What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.

Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. 

"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, Hurrah, Hurrah", there should be celebration for him after battle. The Johnny of this story, Joe Bonham, an ordinary "Joe", got his gun alright, but there is no happy ending for him. Aged 20, one day in September 1918, he is saved from an exploding shell but reduced to a silent, faceless torso, lacking all four limbs and the ability to hear, see or speak.

“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage.

After a tentative start, and several episodes of insipidity, Sarah Phelps's World War One nursing drama started to hit its straps just as series one reached its conclusion. The pace accelerated, the characters flung off their camouflage of tepid blandness, and suddenly everyone was struggling with crises, guilt and dark secrets.

Paths of Glory (1957) stars Kirk Douglas as a First World War colonel who's as fearless leading his poilus on a suicide mission as he is arguing for mercy for three of the survivors. A lawyer in peacetime, he defends them when they are tried as cowards before a panel of French officers who have no intention of exonerating them.

"I don't think it makes a good play, but it's a remarkable one," Sean O'Casey famously remarked of The Silver Tassie, his late-1920s drama about the depredations of war, and how simultaneously right and wrong he was. To be sure, his four-act play set before, during, and after the ravages of World War One isn't "good" if one is referring to something theatrically tidy and manicured and all of a piece.

The BBC is going to reap a rich harvest from The Crimson Field. Sarah Phelps’s drama impresses for a whole number of reasons that will score with viewers: there's the closed community and class elements we know so well from the likes of Downton, as well as rather more room for fermentation of youthful hormones, male and female alike, among a shapely cast.

In a hectic writing career spanning theatre, radio, film and TV, Sarah Phelps can lay claim to such milestone moments of popular culture as both the return of Den Watts to EastEnders and his subsequent demise in 2005, and writing the screenplay for BBC One's adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations at Christmas 2011, which starred Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson.

Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through.