Any son of Ulster knows that the Battle of the Somme was 100 years ago, but may as well have happened yesterday, such is its ongoing importance in Northern Ireland.

Since Frank McGuiness’s Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme was first performed in 1985, it has been regarded by many as the ultimate retelling of the brutal battle and the shockwaves that have pulsed through Irish society in the century since.

Jeremy Herrin’s staging of the play was, if anything, all the more poignant in this centenary year.

Through the rambling flashbacks of Sean McGinley’s Kenneth Piper – the last surviving of the eight soldiers – we were taken back to meet the young men before they shipped out to France. Not so much a band of brothers, as a rag-tag bunch of boys playing at war, from Coleraine farmers to a Fermanagh blacksmith, a Derry footballer to Belfast shipyard workers.

But from their first meeting, to their leave back in Ulster, and back to the frontline of the Somme, something, as WB Yeats would put it, is changed utterly.

Chris McCurry as William Moore and Iarla MccGowan as John Millen are naive, wide-eyed country boys, Jonny Holden little more than a boy from Derry.

They are the men who want a war, but are perhaps not sure why.

Marcus Lamb’s uptight clergyman Christopher Roulston, stalking the stage like the floor of his cold manse, is running from something, or perhaps trying to find a meaning in life that God has not been able to provide.

Donal Gallery as young Kenneth Piper is looking for something too, his Anglo-Irish accent and chaotic, boundless energy covering up his insecurities.

Special praise must go to Paul Kennedy as salt-of-the-earth working class shipyard man Nat McIlwaine.

Strip away the stage and McIlwaine could be swaggering out of Harland and Wolff under the shadow of the Titanic, marching with the Orange Order and surviving on a diet of drums, flutes and opposition to Papists.

Yet for all the great performances, it is the small touches which make this performance a resounding success.

The whispered melody of Fair Three Well Enniskillen drifting across the barbed wire on the frontline, the haunting melodies of Ulster’s gospel halls as the men pray together and the homage in the final act to JP Beadle’s famous painting of the Ulster Division going over the top on July 1, 1916.

Ulster’s present, and its more recent past, could be addressed more obliquely, but Herrin has correctly judged that there is no need.

With a story so powerful and performances so authentic, the story of eight sons of Ulster can speak more clearly than any history book. 4/5