The timing could not have been bettered - deliberately so, one assumes. On the very day that Barack Obama was elected to the US presidency, with his promise of a bright new dawn for his country, an Oxford Playhouse first-night audience saw a revival of a remarkable play which illustrates in a most shocking and graphic way how America’s cherished standards of freedom and fairness have been abused in the past. Since its focus is on corruption in the military, specifically on a blatant infringement of human rights, there is topicality there, too, even though the events it depicts happened nearly 20 years ago. For good measure, where comparisons are being made, the setting is the US base on Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.

The play is A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin, well known for his television series West Wing and a writer much admired by Mr Obama, who said last year: “My intention is to steal a lot of your lines.” It was first seen on Broadway in 1989 and later became a successful and critically acclaimed film starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. This week’s gripping and assured revival will have provided the first opportunity for many of us, myself included, to see it as originally conceived - and most impressive it is. Director Tim Hoare’s all-student cast perform impeccably to a man and, indeed, to a woman in the case of the one female on stage, Victoria (Tor) Lupton, who gives a winning and accomplished performance as Joanne Galloway, a lawyer in the Naval Judge Advocate General’s Office who is instumental in uncovering the Guantanamo abuse.

The true(ish) story, told partly partly in flashback, is a slightly complicated one, focusing on the murder of a Puerto Rican Marine Private Santiago (Seb Peel) who falls foul of his colleagues for, allegedly, not pulling his weight in the corps. Two men have been charged with his murder, Private Harold Downey (Archie Davies) and Lieut Cpl Louden Dawson (Matt Orton). Both slaves to military discipine, they seem happy to take the rap, and the lengthy jail sentence they will be given. But Joanne smells a rat. This is all too convenient for the base superiors. The suspicion is that they almost certainly ordered Santiago’s beating up as a ‘Code Red’, their unofficial way of punishing disloyality to the corps - in Santiago’s case by letters to a US Senator pleading to be sent home from Cuba.

Specifically in the sights of the defence lawyers are the base’s odious commander Col Jessep (Vic Putz) and his religion-crazed ‘enforcer’ Lieut Jonathan Kendrick, another impressive performance from Tom Palmer, one of the most talented and versatile student actors for some years. Eventually, the matter is to be cleared up in a thrilling court case with a starring and stirring role for the tyro defence lawyer Daniel Kaffee, who was played by Tom Cruise in the film and here scarcely less effectively by Sam Caird. Among much excellent work from the actors is the dignified performance by Hugh Malone as the Court Martial’s judge and an affecting portrayal of the good-stort Capt Markinson by Omar El-Okdah.

Special praise is deserved for Lili Carr’s set, which switches easily from barracks to courtroom and is dominated by a barbed-wire-bedecked watchtower, complete with sentry and roaming searchlight. And if this evening were not electifying enough, it ends (appropriately) with perhaps the most perfect guitar solo committed to vinyl - the soaring beauties of Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower. Performances continue until Saturday.