So Great a Crime

Synopsis

"It's my word against theirs. With the establishment and the press against me, what chance have I got?" Well loved national hero, or predatory paedophile? So Great a Crime tells the true story of "Fighting Mac" - Sir Hector MacDonald - who rose from humble beginnings as a crofter's son through the ranks of the British Army to become a knight of the realm, hero of the Battle of Omdurman and Queen Victoria's favourite general. His active soldiering days over, he was appointed General Officer Commanding in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), but soon finds himself in conflict with the high born elite who run the colony. Allegations of liaisons with young boys surface and MacDonald is forced to return home. Rather than face a court martial, he shoots himself in a Paris hotel. But was he guilty? Or was he the victim of a plot fabricated by an English Establishment, motivated by jealousy and snobbery, at a Gaelic-speaking upstart who got above himself? A fascinating journey into an unsolved historical mystery...

Our Review:

8 January 2013

"National hero or predatory paedophile?" It's an arresting tag line, yet far from being a story ripped from today's headlines So Great a Crime is a court-martial tale from the reign of Queen Victoria - a prescient piece of scheduling by the Finborough Theatre that must have been planned well before Operation Yewtree entered the collective consciousness.

In fact writer-director David Gooderson’s interest in the rise and fall of Sir Hector MacDonald has less to do with sexual prurience than the examination of class snobbery. When “Fighting Mac” (as the army general was affectionately known) was the commanding officer in Ceylon he fell into conflict with the high-born coterie who ran the colony, and this self-serving élite may or may not have trumped up spurious allegations of sexual impropriety in order to rid themselves of a Gaelic-speaking upstart who was clearly 'not one of us'.

So ...