Furious Folly would have been an apt title for Mark Anderson's agreement to re-eanact No Man’s Land in 1915, rather than the show he devised

Gathering an audience of 2000 people together to take part in the confusing melee of the WW1 front line, surrounded by the noise, lights, barrage, instructions, commands, smoke, gas and silence associated with trench warfare seemed an impossible task.

And yet Mark has already proved that Furious Folly works, created as it was for the WW1 Commemorations in Belgium last year where it premiered to such effect.

Staged two miles from the front surrounded by cemeteries with a bugle playing, Mark says: "It was a very powerful show which happened all around us, both focussed and spread out, and I was surprised how dramatic that was, going from the dynamic to moments of nothing. That’s something I was really reaching for, the need for complete silence to contrast against the barrage of noise and sound when the ground shook.

Now coming to Oxford's Magdalen College school field on Friday and Saturday night, your county now needs you - to take part. "2000 people give it the energy required to carry the whole thing off because it has to be big. It needs to be a real spectacle.

"When you think about the number of people killed, 20,000 British soldiers on the first day of The Somme, we couldn’t do something small scale.

"And we want the audience to know what its like being told to go somewhere without not knowing why, to get annoyed and confused, just like the soldiers at the front, to go over the top, to be pushed this way, to face each other in columns, to feel the lack of control over what happens to you, the gas and noise and lights.

"It’s like a big cubist collage of art which assaults the audience as it enfolds around them. They will be disorientated. So the big question for us was how to hold it together, while allowing the appearance of confusion on a very large scale."

But where did he begin with something like this, having specialised in sound installation until then. "Well I said no straight away to start with: "I thought it was a ludicrous idea and told them I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But the idea just wouldn’t go away, and whatever other work I did, it was always there at the back of my mind germinating away. So then I said yes,” he chuckles.

Why? “Probably because I like a massive challenge, and I certainly got one.”

But then I got invited out to make a site visit to Poperinge which was behind the lines where the munitions and troops were sent in 1915 and from the rooftops you could see where the battles were fought which was quite pertinent.

"And then I found a dead tree in the middle of a field and it really stuck in my mind, and I thought this is where the show will end with gas and noise and lights."

To help prepare Mark started reading the classic war novels and poems as research. "It took me to quite a dark place because all I read about was people dying and the carnage and injustice, the defeats. But The Monocled Mutineer pulled me out of it and made me realise there was more to it than that, with other people protesting against the war, the conscientious objectors, the deserters, so I went and sat in a hotel room and wrote the show, the same show we are bringing to Oxford basically.

So how does he feel about Furious Folly now? "It’s a real culmination of my life’s work, all the different strands coming together – the pyrotechnics and fire, the politics, the text, all working together to give it a longevity which I have found most fulfilling.

"But it did affect me. There was so much darkness and violence. But this is something really special and I hope Oxford supports it and comes out in their numbers."