“As a ‘slice of life’ — horribly abnormal life — I should say let it be performed by all means.” Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw when asked by the playwright R. C. Sherriff to put in a good word for his First World War drama Journey’s End, which London managements were leaning over backwards not to put on in 1928.

It finally opened in December that year in a two-performance run starring Laurence Olivier as Stanhope, the officer who turns to drink as the only way of facing the horrors of the trenches. After it transferred to bigger West End premises, it ran successfully for two years and has been a standard in the repertoire and on school reading lists ever since.

The production coming to the Playhouse next week was launched in 2004, running in London and on Broadway. Its director, David Grindley, had gone out beforehand to visit various battlefields in Northern France and Belgium to take in the atmosphere and try to visualise what Sherriff, a war veteran himself, would have seen.

A few weeks ago, I joined a party of local newspaper arts writers led by Grindley on a day trip that took in Vimy Ridge and the Loos battlefield.

Beautifully-kept cemeteries dot the landscape, forever keeping green the memories of those who lie therein; but to experience a barely-reconstructed length of tunnel in which British troops massed at Vimy is truly to understand how Sherriff himself lived and the foul conditions in which he placed his characters.

The play concentrates on life and death over four days in trenches at Saint-Quentin in 1918 and the relationships between five officers — most importantly that between Captain Stanhope and the naive and hero-worshipping 2nd Lieutenant Raleigh.

As I talked to David Grindley in the cemetery at Notre Dame de Lorette, near Arras, he wanted to emphasise that he doesn’t believe Journey’s End is an anti-war play.

“The officers all knew why they were there and they accepted that fact. It’s critically just Lieutenant Hibbert who can’t go through it.

“An important interpretative tool for my production is that each participant has a key coping strategy or displacement activity that prevents them from thinking about the war and then being overwhelmed by fear in the way that Hibbert is.

“I think the play is a commemoration by the author of the men he served with — an example of survivor’s guilt.”

Sherriff wrote elsewhere that the officers he fought with were the best company of fellows he’d ever met and that’s why he needed to write about them.

I wondered whether Grindley thought him a fine dramatist: “He is in this play. He never wrote a good play again. But then he did go and write some of the most significant films of his era — The Four Feathers, Odd Man Out and Goodbye Mr Chips, for example. He found his feet with this play and his metier in writing screenplays.”

From the outset, David Grindley insisted on casting the right actors for the various roles — especially from the point of view of their ages — and thus there are no ‘names’ in his production.

“The actors who play Stanhope and Raleigh were vital, and I couldn’t be held hostage by casting names. And anyway, apart from Orlando Bloom, there’s virtually no ‘name’ who looks 21.

“Incidentally, when I first put this production on, Benedict Cumberbatch — now Sherlock Holmes, of course — was in the frame.”

If he’d been able to get everyone together, Grindley says, he’d have taken the cast members on the same sort of trip that we journalists were on; but he is happy that the depth of hands-on research he himself has done has been passed on successfully.

Journey’s End runs from February 21 to 26.