It is the dramatic story of a brave woman - and as author Stephanie Street states, A Small and Quiet Light at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre is fiction based on real events.

Priyanga Burford is outstanding as Second World War heroine Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, backed by a talented all-woman cast interchanging from male to female roles.

Codenamed Madeleine, Noor is in France - flown from RAF Tangmere by the special operations executive - as a radio operator sending information on German airfields and enemy positions.

She falls in love with a man called Viennot (Léa des Garets) but, wrongly fearing he has betrayed her, she goes away and continues sending information to London until she is arrested in 1943.

Held at Germany’s Avenue Foch headquarters in Paris, she is interrogated by Nazi officer Vogt (a commanding Caoilfhionn Dunne) who has Noor’s code book and portable wireless.

Noor’s family and friends wander on stage throughout. We learn she was a talented writer and musician who first lived in Paris with her wealthy Indian father and American mother (Amanda Hadingue, with contrasting loving mum and vicious Nazi officer Kieffer roles).

Noor begs Vogt to shoot her but instead he gently interrogates her, promising she will avoid torture if she names her contacts. She refuses to talk and spends ten months in an isolation cell, provoking two contrasting scenes of her fate.

The imaginary one sees Noor with her friends, laughing and talking in a train carriage heading for Dachau. In reality she is tortured and in chains on a filthy floor bound for the death camp.

Director Elin Schofield has done a sterling job bringing together an at times confusing drama, highlighting a Croix de Guerre recipient with a bust in London and a Royal Air Force Club portrait unveiled by the Queen.

A Small and Quiet Light runs until September 12.

Sheila Checkley