Not About Heroes
Stephen MacDonald‘s 1982 two-hander is a moving dramatisation of the chance meeting and subsequent close friendship between the World War I poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Based on real events, as recorded in their diaries and letters, MacDonald re-creates the circumstances that transformed both men’s lives with compelling imagination and insight.
The two writers met at the Craiglockhart Hospital for Mental Disorders in Edinburgh in 1917. Sassoon had shortly before published a protest against the war, but rather than disciplining him, the military authorities decided he needed psychiatric treatment, as surely a man who’d won the Military Cross must have become mentally unhinged to utter such unpatriotic sentiments. Owen, though apparently regarded by his commanding officer as a coward, was hospitalised for shell shock.
After an awkward first encounter between these two very different personalities, a deep love of poetry and a common desire to bring the horrors of trench warfare to public attention turn them into intimate friends, both writing for the hospital magazine Hydra.
Sassoon, already an established poet, recognises the as yet unpublished Owen’s genius, encouraging and editing the younger man, who went on to write such masterpieces as “Dulce et Decorum Est” before being killed exactly one week before Armistice Day. As Owen himself said, “The poetry is in the pity”.
Ian Flintoff‘s production successfully captures the elegiac mood of MacDonald’s chamber piece as Sassoon, struggling with the guilt of the survivor, looks back to past events that have haunted him ever since. With a few patriotic war songs and propaganda war posters on the wall lending a bitterly ironic undertone to the drama, the menace of war hangs in the background like a shroud during this brief respite in hospital.
The developing relationship between the two poets is enacted with sensitivity and subtlety. Dov Citron shows that beneath Sassoon’s confident, sometimes brusque, exterior lies an emotionally turbulent man whose “heroism” was an expression of grief and anger rather than courage. Martin Scully‘s Owen may seem hesitant and self-deprecating, but he still conveys the inner belief in his own literary merit that drove him to become the greatest of the war poets.
– Neil Dowden
