The Colliers Wood Chorus has something special planned to mark ten years as a group.

With members ranging from 22 years old to 91, the 65-person choir will be telling the story of the First World War.

Musical director Christopher Killerby believes that community choirs are capable of performing challenging music, which has led them to often taken on larger-scale works.

This time around will be no different.

"It was the choir’s eagerness to be involved in a theatrical production that inspired our next big project, King Arthur, to mark our tenth anniversary," Mr Killerby said.

"This enthusiasm is evident in the fact that the choir have raised over £10,000 towards the production costs."

He hopes to explore what motivates people to be soldiers, nurses, or conscientious objectors, and how they survived gas attacks, shell shock, separation and bereavement.

"We were careful not to shoe-horn our WW1 setting into the original text but John Dryden himself pointed us to this concept with references to noxious mists and the ground shaking during an intense battle," the musical director said.

"There are also slightly more challenging magical moments; a frost scene where love awakens the frozen soldiers, a pastoral scene where the soldiers are reminded of home as the postman delivers parcels and letters from home."

Professional performers will take on the lead roles and the opera will also be supported by a live chamber orchestra.

"We're casting Merlin as a female field surgeon and the wizard Osmond is instead, an intelligence officer with the nymphs and fairies being nurses and civilians.," Mr Killerby said.

"The chorus will have various levels of involvement with some static, but engaged, on stage, others more actively moving into the action and others performing small vignettes within the drama as identifiable characters."

The performances will be at Merton Arts Space in the Wimbledon Library for four days, with it all culminating with the final performance on November 11, exactly one hundred years to the day since the Allies signed the Armistice.