Modifying the title of Hannah Arendt’s 1970 study of intellectuals facing overwhelming evil, this play could be called Women in Dark Times.

We are presented with a brilliantly acted, fictitious gathering of seven women on the day of the collapse of the French Third Republic in 1940 and the triumph of Nazi Germany.

Five of these are the Literary stars and artistic intelligentsia of the time: Gertrude Stein, Lillian Hellman, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Parker and Alice B Toklas.

Also in the mix, and the first guest to arrive, is Muriel Gardiner (played by Emily Ross), an American living in Vienna who is in the dangerous business of smuggling Jewish people out of the clutches of the Nazi regime, and the fictional Bernadette (Raven Baksh), a German Jewish rape victim who was rescued by Stein and Toklas and who acts as their domestic servant.

This is a densely intellectual play which obeys the Aristotelian unities of place, action and time. It’s packed with literary allusion and seething with clashes of Weltanschauung, principally between Stein (played by Suzanne Notman) and Hellman (Gillian Henderson). Christie (Karen Stroeder) and Parker (Deborah Pharoah-Williams) provide some light relief and lapidary comment.

Christie on Hitler: “That man is a ninny”, said with all the contempt of the British upper crust. Parker sums up the theme of the play with this comment: “It’s not the tragedy that kills us, it’s the little wars”.

Using a device that has its roots in ancient theatre, each character in turn narrates some central incident from their lives. This device leads to Bernadette’s horrific recall of her rape at the hand of Nazi thugs, and Gardiner’s description of the torture and murder of one of her colleagues.

Notman’s Stein bristles with contradictions. She’s Jewish, but anti-Semitic. She is anti-Nazi but pro Pétain. She’s a lesbian who hates Hellman’s 1934 The Children’s Hour, one of the first plays to deal with lesbian relationships. Yet she has a deep existential angst about the past (“What will become of the memories?”); her own condition, (“Why am I not normal?”) and the future, (“Time will pass like a kidney stone”). She is also bitchy, but butch. Her emotional anchor is Alice B Toklas (Heather Conyers), who provides Stein with loving, loyal domestic stability, describing their first meeting in 1907 with moving simplicity.

BMDS’ technical crew do a good job on the sound and set: we hear extracts from Charles Trenet’s La Mer and Marshall Pétain’s address to the French nation. Interval music is the atmospheric first movement of Bach’s first cello suite. The set is full of very lived-in furniture and realistic literary clutter, prompting Hellman to mutter: “Don’t pick up on our account”. Actually, realistic clutter is surprisingly hard to achieve.

American Steven Carl McCasland wrote the play. Director Carol Birch and producer Jenn Campbell and the cast are to be congratulated on their achievement. The play is unusual, dense, and in these troubled times, intensely relevant.

Little Wars isn’t recommended for viewers under the age of 15. The play continues through Saturday at Daylesford at 8pm. Tickets, $30, are available at www.bmds.bm, www.ptix.bm and at the Daylesford box office an hour before the show. For more information visit www.bmds.bm.