Written and directed by Amiel Gladstone. A Cultch presentation of an Amiel Gladstone production. At the Cultch's Historic Theatre on Saturday, November 10. Continues until November 17

The present-day context for Three Winters couldn’t be clearer: Remembrance Day is a perfect time for a play that focuses on wartime experience. But more context within the world of the play would make its stories clearer.

Writer-director Amiel Gladstone based the script on the experiences of his grandfather, who spent three years in Stalag Luft III, a Nazi POW camp famous for the Great Escape of 1945, which saw 78 prisoners leave through an elaborately constructed underground tunnel (all but three were caught, and most were subsequently killed by the Nazis). The camp also had a theatre, where the prisoners would regularly stage plays.

Gladstone’s grandfather is the inspiration for the central character, Len, who early in the play recounts his capture by the Germans when his fighter plane is shot down and his parachute lands him in a tree. The rest of his crew perishes; Len finds a new community with the other inhabitants of his hut. The play is full of fascinating details, but how they fit together isn’t always clear. Late in the play, though, when the focus shifts to the escape attempt, the momentum picks up considerably.

The first surprise in this production is Gladstone’s casting: young women play all of the roles. This is a laudable choice in the world of theatre in 2018, but a conceit that explains this casting within the play might help to ground the performances.

More context could also help signal when the characters are shifting from life in the hut to acting in the camp’s theatre, in scenes that are more (Macbeth) or less (S.N. Berhman’s No Time for Comedy) recognizable. Performing must have offered a lifeline for the real-life  prisoners, but its significance is only explored for one character, Olivia Hutt’s George, who relishes playing the female roles as a safe expression of queer sexuality.

Camille Legg’s Arthur has fun as George’s frequent scene partner, but we don’t know much else about him. Characterization is minimal for most of the hut’s inhabitants, so some of the performances are oddly flat. And Julia Siedlanowska’s Len, the play’s centre, is curiously subdued.

Gladstone’s stripped-down aesthetic finds its best expression in Adrian Muir’s set design. The bare, wood-plank stage is graced by a large rectangular wooden crate that transforms from the wings of Len’s doomed Halifax fighter plane to the tunnel through which the prisoners attempt to escape to a barre in a ballet class.

Three Winters is a stylish history lesson, but it needs something more to hold the details together.