One day last summer, thanks to the artist Jeremy Deller, silent soldiers from the first world war mysteriously appeared on UK streets like ghosts urging us to reflect on our collective past. Around the same time – and as part of the same 14-18 Now cultural programme – the National Theatre of Scotland presented The 306: Dawn, a tribute to those men who lost their lives during the conflict not as heroes but as “cowards”. Whether through fear, pacifism or trauma, they were soldiers who had fled their positions and paid the price at the hands of their own side.

In the second part of his trilogy, playwright Oliver Emanuel brings us home, to the munitions factories, post offices and street corners of Britain, where a domestic army of women are keeping the country going. But these are not the happy workers of patriotic myth. Rather they are the bolshie agitators of a disenfranchised sex, the suffragettes and militants who know their worth, know they are being exploited and know the futility of war.

The songs freeze the play’s emotional moments … The 306: Day. Photograph: Marilyn Kingwill

If the men who were executed had their stories written out of history, it is even more the case for the women who, through shame, ignorance or social pressure, were unable even to give voice to their loss. In a patchwork of scenes, Emanuel shows the toxic mixture of anger, bewilderment and grief suffered by powerful women running up against an even more powerful system of state control.

His script is best when it’s at its most confrontational, when the voice of injustice meets the dead hand of authority, as when Dani Heron’s Nellie is forced to justify her suffragette sympathies to police officers convinced she is a communist revolutionary. There are moments, however, when the play wobbles towards soap-opera banality, the scenes of everyday strife not equal to the great themes it aspires to take on. It progresses through the war, but it could do with a grander narrative arc.

At every turn, however, the play is lifted by Gareth Williams’s score, performed live by pianist Laura McIntosh and cellist Robert Irvine of the Red Note Ensemble, and sung by Jemima Levick’s tremendous six-strong cast. As with the first instalment, music is a central component, Williams adopting the directness of Kurt Weill while counterpointing modernist angularity with lush harmonies. In the case of a song called Harry, gorgeously sung by Amanda Wilkin as the bereaved Gertrude, he also hints at a pop sensibility worthy of Lily Allen.

The songs freeze the play’s emotional moments, intensifying the women’s sadness and vexation, not to mention their spirit of resistance, in a way that adds layers of texture. Performed in the round on a tour of non-theatre spaces, Levick’s production, a joint venture with Perth Theatre and Stellar Quines, captures the sense of ordinary lives enduring extraordinary circumstances. At its best, it is contentious, rousing and not a little humbling.