THEATRE:Sam Mendes makes an impressive return to the stage with To the Green Fields Beyond

After his triumph at this year's Oscars, Sam Mendes could no doubt be in high-income Hollywood, making Canadian Beauty, British Beauty or, if whim combined with his present power, even Latvian Beauty.

Instead, here he is at his native Donmar Warehouse in London, staging a new play by a little-known dramatist who shares a name with a quiet Yorkshire fishing town. And a refreshingly unfashionable choice Nick Whitby's To the Green Fields Beyond turns out to be.

What went through the heads of those squaddies as they climbed from their trenches and ran to certain death at the Somme? It's a question that few of the living can presume to begin to answer. And what was the mindset of men who were ordered to trundle out, clustered tightly together, in what were laughingly called tanks but were actually hot, stinking boxes whose armour the Germans had learned to penetrate? That's the question Whitby confronts in his engrossing, ambitious if uneven play.

When we enter the Donmar most of the tankmen are slumped among the birch trees that cover the stage, enduring the one thing they find more frightening than battle: the night before battle. Six are white British, one a Sikh, one a black Jamaican, and all clearly combine expertise with a camaraderie that supersedes rank, colour, anything.

They even talk in an argot of their own: "chub it", "kinch, duckboard glide, bung and bogeypoke." Indeed, one of Whitby's main points is that work like this, danger like this, creates a sense of unity that verges on the mystical. But would rather ordinary men start reading Blake's Songs of Innocence to each other or talking in terms that evokes his Marriage of Heaven and Hell? Would a corporal speculate that this is Armageddon, the hideous start to centuries of peace? Probably not. Certainly, Whitby goes over the top in his efforts to define the feeling of going over the top. But you can't adequately argue with him because you can't know. That's emphasised by a visiting American journalist, a smug moralist slyly investigating tales of atrocities. How can he or anyone understand or judge men who come "from another time", belong in another physical field?

This is a play that could disappear with an apocalyptic whoosh into the stratosphere, but it never does. Partly that's because recognisable reality does intrude. A Belgian prostitute is on hand, and finds plenty of takers for her good-natured offers of sex and comfort. And one of the soldiers, Finbar Lynch's Venus, suggests that they sabotage their doomed vehicle, saving themselves for a more auspicious day. It's an idea they debate, try to vote on - only to be chastened by the sound of the tramping, chorusing infantry that believes in them.

Moreover, Mendes's cast is strong enough to make you credit the talk of fate, angelic support, spiritual togetherness, pretty much everything. Some characters are cursorily realised, but several, notably Dougray Scott's battle-scarred commander and Ray Winstone's East Ender, will surely stick in the mind. When Winstone's big, beefy ex-chauffeur quietly admits his inner terrors, then unpretentiously expresses his love for the ragbag of men around him, you'll not just be touched. You'll be glad Sam Mendes decided to come home. This review appeared in later editions of The Times yesterday.

Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd.