Various parts of Southampton are celebrating each other. When I visited, the city’s Guildhall Square was alive with a commemoration of its central role in the construction of the WW2 fighter plane the Spitfire, and also jollying up the opening of a new sister venue for the Nuffield Theatre on the university campus (hence the NST rebranding). The new City venue, meanwhile, with its deep-thrust stage, is also staging a play about the city and the Spitfire by Howard Brenton, and further widening its embrace by utilising a cast of eight professional actors backed by an ensemble of 25 community performers.

Brenton tells the true story – albeit largely through invented characters – of how, following the September 1940 Luftwaffe bombing of the Spitfire factory at Woolston, the Supermarine company’s design department was relocated to stately Hursley House but the actual construction of plane components to dozens of “shadow factories” requisitioned from commercial premises across the city. In particular he shows the ambivalent relationship to the legislation which authorised such commandeering: refusal to acquiesce led to imprisonment, which drives the question – repeated several times in the play – of where the freedoms are for which we are supposedly fighting.

Brenton is a master of portraying major historical episodes on an individual human scale, and is equally adroit at airing both sides of thorny issues such as this without weighting the scales on either side. Here, Anita Dobson doubles as the lady of the “big house” whose romantic notions about doing her bit are banished by the reality of being declared a trespasser in her own house, and the iron-backed mother of a city laundry owner at the forefront of the shadow programme. Catherine Cusack doubles as the laundryman’s wife and the only woman on the aircraft design team, and Hilton McRae as Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook does not pretend to crises of conscience over his unbending decisions but does not relish them either. Samuel Hodges directs with fluency, quickly dissipating my doubts about including song-and-dance sequences in such material, with Akhila Krishnan’s floor-projected maps keeping us clear on the shifting locations. Britain as a nation is not good at candid self-reflection; it’s valuable both that a play like this exists and that it manifests as part of a broader civic programme.

Written for the Financial Times.