James Mackenzie

“Not About Heroes”, by Stephen Macdonald, and here directed by John Haswell for the Rowan Tree Theatre, is a powerful and extremely moving play about two poets whose finest works were forged in the horror of the trenches of the First World War.

It tells of the developing friendship and love between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, beginning with their meeting in Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital, and of the flowering of Owen’s talent under Sassoon’s tutelage.

The characters are finely balanced, with Owen’s relatively lowly middle class origins, his youthful passion and shyness, contrasting with Sassoon’s privileged background, and his blunt and almost cynical brashness. We learn early that Owen is in this hospital - for those officers mentally affected by their experiences - suffering from neurasthenia, while Sassoon has really been imprisoned there for speaking out against the masters of war.

The title of the play comes from the preface Owen wrote for his first (posthumously) published book of poems, and which is quoted by him in the play:

“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
“Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
“Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
“My subject is War, and the pity of War.
“The Poetry is in the pity…”

These lines are echoed in Owen’s unfinished masterpiece “Strange Meeting”, also quoted:

“For of my glee might many men have laughed
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity of war distilled…”

This is what the two men share. It is their humanity, their compassion, which binds them together. But there is also a tension between them: Sassoon’s urgent pacifism and Owen’s desire to return to the front line and prove himself ready to die - if only to write of the utter waste of young human life. This tension explodes into a face to face argument between them, before the first act ends with Owen’s departure from the hospital, having been pronounced fit to return to active service.

The second act is initially based on correspondence between the two. Owen, thanks to Sassoon, begins to be fêted by the London literati on his way back to France. He has, as both the poet Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon himself acknowledged, reached the summit of Parnassus. Incidentally the descriptions of Graves and other contemporary writers like H. G. Wells are highly amusing, particularly when subjected to Sassoon’s acerbic wit.

But in another letter, Owen reveals his true feelings about his mentor: “And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time. And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us, we praised God…and knew we loved one another as no men love for long.”

Owen’s letters to his mother also form a thread throughout the play, and evoke his admiration of Sassoon’s genius, his acceptance as a poet in his own right, and also the grim realities of the war he experiences.

The two poets are to meet again. Sassoon, after returning to active service, is hospitalised once more, having been shot in the head – by a British sniper – while standing helmet-less in no man’s land. Owen, on home leave, visits him, telling him he has found a kind of serenity – the irony being that his poetic vocation allows him to endure the continuing horrors of trench warfare, and the imminent threat of death. Sassoon opens up and reveals his grief at the loss of his adolescent friend earlier in the war.

There are only three physical expressions of Owen’s love of Sassoon in the play. In Act One, there is an awkward parting embrace, which the latter almost rejects. This parting both opens and closes the act. In Act Two, as Owen leaves a sleeping, wheel-chaired Sassoon, he slowly withdraws his hands from the other’s, and then touches him tenderly on the cheek.

The play draws to a climax with a juxtaposition of Owen under bombardment, and Sassoon recalling events at his post-war desk. But at Owen’s untimely death – one week before the armistice – Sassoon lays a torn red blanket over his friend, reciting his poem, The Dug-Out:

“Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face…”

This is the posture that Owen adopts before the bayoneted, bloodied blanket is laid over him. A brilliant piece of direction. As is the anger expressed by each of them, just before, hitting lampshades above them so that the light resembles flashes of shell-fire, with Owen angrily declaiming: “Let us sleep now…”, the last lines of “Strange Meeting”, which are normally read or spoken or sung as elegiac.

Sassoon is left regretful, not a little bitter, and bereaved. A “chasm” has been left in him by the loss of his friend – and, at the time, unacknowledged lover.

As director John Haswell notes in the programme: “This is not a play about poetry; it is a poetic play about two men.” The terrible injustice of the war is the making of both men, as well as their undoing. But an underlying theme is the then illicit homosexual love, which even now is still regarded as counter-productive by the armed services, and abhorrent by many in our so-called enlightened society. Watching this play, you cannot but be touched by the revelations that Owen was officially a highly regarded officer, won the Military Cross, was given command of his company, and cared for the men under his command with undisputed, spiritual, compassion. His homosexuality was not a factor in his military service – or perhaps it actually contributed to his compassionate behaviour?

True love, providing it is really concerned with truth, is love, whatever its sexual content or context, and can bring out the best of humanity. It is a central message of Stephen Macdonald’s play. That and what these two poets so well cried out: the suffering and sacrifice of so many in World War One was for nothing. That is worth remembering at this time, when this country is involved in two wars – again (Britain has fought more wars than any other country in the past 300 years) - and when Armistice Day has just been “celebrated” 90 years on.

Congratulations to Rowan Tree Theatre, to the director, who also arranged the subtle lighting, and to the two actors, Oliver Bissett and Matthew Burgess, for bringing us this outstanding production shown at just two public halls in Shetland, Walls and Scalloway. The staging of the play at “ground level” worked to engage the audience intimately, and the simple backdrops, curtains of hand-written inscriptions of the war dead, were supremely effective.

I have read that this production was also shown at the still existing Craiglockhart Hospital – a fitting tribute to two heroes who would never have wanted to be thought of as such.

My thanks also to Robina Barton, who advised me to take a tissue with me to the play; I didn’t, but fortunately had an ample handkerchief.