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Signed/Audio Described Performances - Thursday 26th October, 8pm & Saturday 28th October, 2.30pm
An intriguing play about the encounter between WWI poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
MacDonald's intimate two-hander charts the friendship of the two men from their initial meeting in Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital where Owen had been sent with nervous shock and Sassoon had been consigned in an attempt to silence his anti-war views. At first Owen is in awe of Sassoon, who is brusque and stand-offish, but they soon form a strong bond. Not About Heroes movingly depicts the intense relationship between the two men whose lives have been caught up in the mess of warfare.
After show talkabout - Not About Heroes, Monday 23rd October. Signed/Audio Described Performances - Thursday 26th October, 8pm & Saturday 28th October, 2.30pm
Time(s) of Production: 8pm; Saturday Matinees: (21st & 28th October) 2.30pm
Location of Production: AB Paterson Auditorium
Signed/Audio Described Performances - Thursday 26th October, 8pm & Saturday 28th October, 2.30pm
Production Biogs
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| St Andrews Citizen, John Paul Breslin | Tackling the horrors of war on stage. Depicting the horrors of war and the effect on those subjected to it is surely a daunting task. However, Stephen MacDonald´s play Not About Heroes uses the work of Wilfred Owen to tackle the subject in a way that is both considerate and thought provoking. Set during the first world war, the majority of the play is based in Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh where officers are being treated for 'nervous disorders'. It is here where two of Britain´s greatest war poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, meet. Owen has been diagnosed as shell-shocked after his return from the Battle of the Somme where he was trapped for three days in a shell-hole. Sassoon, a decorated war hero and well-established poet, has been sent to the hospital for having spoken out against the war. Realising Owen´s talent, Sassoon assists the young poet in developing his style while simultaneously helping hm deal with his condition. The experiences of war that the two men have endured creates a relationship that develops from one of literary mentor and pupil to something much stronger. Owen unwittingly leaves a poem filled with adoration for an unknown subject among work he has given Sassoon to critique and his subsequent embarrassment seems to suggest that the feelings contained within it are for his teacher. This, coupled with lingering embraces and a letter from Owen in which he claims to love Sassoon, hint that the bond between the two poets could be of a homosexual nature. MacDonald´s use of flashbacks not only helped enliven the movement from one scene to the next but helped to highlight the sense that the officers were repeatedly made to relive their moments of despair. These shifts in time and space run smoothly with the help of Yoon Bae´s excellent set which was flawlessly transformed from the battlefield to Edinburgh and back. Although slightly melodramatic at times, William's portrayal of Owen successfully captured the energy and enthusiasm of a poet on the verge of recognising his literary dreams and his performance was perhaps at its best when capturing the torment of Owen´s shattered nerves. For his part, Roberts depiction of Sassoon as a man tortured by war is equally at its most impressive when dealing with the guilt of Owen´s death. | 20/10/2006 |
| The Stage, John di Folco | A paradox? Yes, and one shot through with bitter irony, but World War I, with all its ghastly, mind-crippling statistics of carnage, was truly inspirational in the stimulus it gave to poets. Stephen MacDonald´s Not About Heroes focuses on two of the finest in the English language, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, both in 1917 inmates of Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, an institution created to treat shell-shocked officers, charting the intimate relationship between the two men and skilfully revealing their different personalities, while treading some of the common poetic ground they shared. Simon Roberts has a big, powerful, domineering presence as Sassoon in Stephen Wrentmore´s production, capturing and delivering the poet´s sardonic wit to withering effect. He conveys an inner tension that erupts into seething anger at the reasons for his incarceration. His so-called illness was to protest publicly at the continuing futility of the war and to reject overtly his Military Cross as a symbol of his own heroic achievement. Leon William's Owen is pitched a tad too far towards that of the naive acolyte. In the frantic, breathless dashing around and wide-eyed adulation he shows towards Sassoon, he comes perilously close to demeaning the stature of Owen as a nascent, deeply sensitive and introspective poet. In the second act, however, as he prepares to return to the front, he finds something of the character of doomed youth with real fervour and intensity that makes the depiction of his death a week before Armistice painfully poignant. There is also a paradox embedded in the title of the play. Sassoon and Owen confronted and overcame their respective self-doubts and torments and returned to the cause of them, which seems a singularly heroic thing to do. | 19/10/2006 |
| The Scotsman, Joyce McMillan | Away from the guns, love and poetry flourish briefly..... WHEN Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes first appeared in Edinburgh, back in the early 1980s, it seemed timely because of the upsurge of patriotic feeling surrounding the Falklands War, and because of the age-old contrast between flag-wagging triumphalism back home and the horrors experienced by the troops on the ground. Twenty-five years on, we might have hoped that MacDonald's play - a lyrical and passionate two-handed drama about the brief wartime friendship between the First World War poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon - would have lost some of its relevance. Alas, with British troops again dying every day in foreign wars whose wisdom many of them openly question, the play seems if anything even more contemporary than it did in 1982. Sassoon and Owen met in the summer of 1917, at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, then a centre caring for British soldiers suffering from shell-shock and trauma caused by the horrors of the Western Front. Owen, barely out of school when he first went to the Front, had suffered a nervous collapse in France. But Sassoon, almost a decade older and an experienced officer already decorated for courage in action, had been sent home because he had written an open letter denouncing the war and accusing the authorities of prolonging it for political reasons, at untold cost to the soldiers on the ground. When the two men met, Sassoon was already an established poet, Owen a hesitant beginner. Using a simple flashback structure, and the narrative voice of Sassoon, who survived the war - Owen was killed in action in 1918 - the play describes the growth of their friendship from hero-worship and mentorship to full-blown, if unconsummated, love. It also charts Owen's emergence, during those final 18 months of his life, as one of the great anti-war poets of all time. There is, at times, a certain old-fashioned cheesiness in the way MacDonald tells his story. The scenes in which Sassoon helps Owen to draft some of the most famous lines in English poetry are bound to seem a shade self-conscious and coy; and the relationship between their sexuality and their passionate identification with the soldiers dying at the Front is not fully explored. Nor is MacDonald's play flattered by Stephen Wrentmore's heartfelt but overblown production, which surrounds a text designed for simplicity in performance with an elaborate set and a soundtrack larded with emotive music. | 18/10/2006 |
| The Herald, Neil Cooper | The range of anti-war plays that have taken over the Edinburgh Fringe over the last couple of years may not have all been any good, but even the worst kneejerk creations could at least be seen as necessary. It's interesting that Stephen Wrentmore's revival of Stephen MacDonald's play should arrive now, as it first premiered during the fallout of 1982's Falklands War. Because, while on the surface, this gentle two-hander concerning the relationship between poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen while both confined to Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917 is a tender evocation of literary friendship during time of strife, there's an underlying sense of the futility and loss of war which both men captured in their work, that shines through MacDonald's own words here. The prevailing fascination with dead poets, particularly such doomed romantics as Owen and Sassoon, helps too. With a wet behind the ears Owen chapping on the older Sassoon's door like a literary groupie, the pair eventually become intimates via a form of semantic therapy that puts them both back willingly into the firing line. By the second half, Owen's confidence has grown along with his reputation, and the book-lined parties he frequents in London leave an increasingly damaged Sassoon to carry the guilt of his entire generation. While Wrentmore doesn't particularly attempt to graft anything on to MacDonald's text, it's sensitively if at times understandably plummily handled by Simon Roberts as Sassoon and Leon Williams as Owen. On a set that opens out on to a globe-shaped graveyard, however, it becomes apparent how war is a far from noble business, and Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth is as tragically pertinent as ever. | 18/10/2006 |
| Metro, Eddie Harrison | "I am concerned with poetry. My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is warn "was Wilfred Owen's humble analysis of his own existence. Sadly, his life was snatched away only seven days before the end of World War I. A conflict that started in an atmosphere of intense patriotic excitement was to drag itself out over four years of agonisingly protracted trench warfare, with Owen and Siegfried Sassoon´s 1917 meeting while recuperating at Craiglockhart hospital providing the body of Stephen MacDonald´s play. MacDonald focuses tightly on the friendship between Owen (Leon Williams), gifted but lacking confidence in himself and in his writing, and Sassoon (Simon Roberts), a larger-than-life character widely renowned for his words and his soldiery, but embittered by his experiences. The play opens with a welcome note of irreverence, as Sassoon gifts Owen a book of dreadful verse, director Stephen Wrentmore´s production offering a brisk account of two men with similar concerns but very different destinies. Williams works hard to demythologise Owen, who initially comes over as vain, grasping and star-struck rather than the noble figure he posthumously became. Roberts gives Sassoon a barnstorming swagger, contrasted with a more muted disposition as Sassoon recovers from a head injury. With such a serious subject, Not About Heroes suits a restrained sober production, with Yoon Bae´s eerie set design conjuring up a barren forest of dead wood, rising out of muddied verse trampled underfoot. While it could be argued that the power of Owen´s verse is diluted by the play´s exposure of his compositional processes, or that the strict focus on poetry doesn´t reveal enough about either men for a full drama, MacDonald´s play remains a timely reminder of the poetry and the pity, and why World War I is still worth remembering as the war that promised to end all wars. | 17/10/2006 |
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