Accompanist Iain Burnside's interest in 20th-century British song has produced in a number of outstanding recordings, and now it has resulted in his first stage play, which he has directed himself with singers and actors from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A Soldier and a Maker is based upon the life and music of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), the Gloucester-born composer and poet who studied with Stanford and Vaughan Williams, served in the first world war, and suffered a complete mental breakdown in the early 1920s after he was committed to an asylum.

Burnside interweaves this bleak biography with some of Gurney's huge output of music and poetry, though most of it is still unpublished. There is some pragmatic telescoping of events, in which the violinist Marion Scott and the composer Herbert Howells (rather unsympathetically portrayed) feature prominently, but otherwise the play sticks closely to the documented facts of Gurney's life. The pacing is a little uneven, but his remorseless mental disintegration is poignantly caught. His meeting with Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, who brings with her an ordnance survey map of Gloucestershire on which, in a rare moment of lucidity, Gurney traces the Cotswold roads and villages he knew so well, is beautifully done.

Though the musical performances are rather unbalanced, the staging is polished and in particular Richard Goulding's performance as Gurney is a remarkably fine and very touching one.