TUNES of Glory is a play where the two chief characters are essentially unsympathetic and not easy to like. However, we come to understand them and to see their greatness as well as their flaws.

The play is set in a grim, grey army barracks in the Scottish Highlands, evocatively recreated on stage through sound and digitally projected cinematic backdrops.

Acting-Colonel Jock Sinclair (Stuart McGugan) has risen through the ranks and is an El Alamein hero.

Liked and admired by many of his men, he has a tendency to drunken bullying and under him, military discipline has suffered.

When he is replaced by Colonel Basil Barrow, ex-public school boy and a stickler for rules, he is insulted and insubordinate and the clash of the two personalities threatens to divide the regiment.

Barrow (Patrick Ryecart) makes us no more comfortable than Sinclair.

He is a haunted survivor of a Japanese POW camp, a man whose wife has left him and although we feel for him in his difficult task, he is stiff and unsmiling.

Ryecart and McGugan are both completely believable in their military roles and the other actors manage to convey a real sense of the military and its traditions.

Richard Walsh was wonderful as the RSM

The play ends with the tragic suicide of Barrow. Dreams of commanding his regiment had kept him going during unimaginable suffering in the prison camp but he cannot cope when he feels he has failed the regiment he loves.

Oddly only Sinclair, the man whose sneering disregard for Barrow's command and whose drunken violence precipitates the events that lead to his death, understands.

Despite all objections, Barrow is given a hero's funeral, with full honours.

Based on an award-winning film and novel, the stage version had a lot to live up to. On the whole I think Middle Ground Thea-tre Company achieved it.

Sue Vickers