Not About Heroes

Not About Heroes

Napier University, Edinburgh

Neil Cooper

It is more than 30 years since Stephen MacDonald's study of the relationship between poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (while both were residents in Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital) appeared during his tenure as artistic director of Dundee Rep.

Arriving in Edinburgh in a new touring production by Feelgood Theatre Productions as the latest in a flurry of plays produced to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, the play's mix of poetry and condemnation looks more pertinent than ever.

This is especially the case when performed inside the striking building where Sassoon and Owen first met, long before it became Napier University's Craiglockhart campus.

Here we see Owen as a young, nervy and shell-shocked literary groupie who suddenly finds himself in the same institution as one of his idols.

While Owen is initially cowed, under Sassoon's guidance his writing finds a voice, and Sassoon opens him up to big-league literary society in the first half of Caroline Clegg's suitably intimate production. With the momentum of the play's second act driven by Owen's poetry as well as letters home to his mother, when the inevitable happens, the loss damages Sassoon forever.

There's a stiff-upper-lip poignancy to MacDonald's script, in which the eloquence of the two men on the page and the social ease they feel around each other only goes so far emotionally.

This is made clear in a pair of powerful and understated performances by Simon Jenkins as Owen and Alasdair Craig as Sassoon.

At the play's crucial heart is a deep-set understanding of the futility of war and the heartbreak it can cause.