Not About Heroes

Not About Heroes is a drama by Stephen MacDonald about the real-life relationship between the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon first performed in 1982 at the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The play has only two characters: Owen and Sassoon. The story of their friendship is told in a series of flashbacks, narrated by Sassoon who survived World War I (in which Owen was killed). Most of the scenes take place during their time as fellow-patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh in 1917.

The title is a quotation from the preface Wilfred Owen wrote in preparation for the publication of his collected poems:

"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."

The action is replayed through the eyes of an older Siegfried Sassoon, as he recalls his relationship with Wilfred Owen, beginning some fourteen years earlier. Owen introduces himself hesitantly to Sassoon when the latter arrives at Craiglockhart in 1917, having been diagnosed as suffering from "war neurosis" as a result of his protest against the war. The course of their friendship is shown through extracts from the real diaries and letters of the two men, right up to their last meeting at the Chelsea Physic Garden, when Sassoon was recovering from a head wound that would end his military career while Owen waited to return to the Western Front, where he would be killed shortly afterwards.

Not About Heroes had its première at the Edinburgh Festival in 1982 and won a Fringe First award. Directed by Eric Standidge, Sassoon was played by the author and Owen by David Learner. It toured and came to the King's Head, was adapted for Yorkshire TV and BBC Radio 4, and was published by Faber and Faber, all in 1983. A new production at the Royal National Theatre in 1986 celebrated the centenary of Sassoon's birth. A national tour took place the following year with Paul Shelley as Siegfried Sassoon and Stephen McGann as Wilfred Owen. In 1992, the author directed a revised text for the Citizen's, Glasgow – a production which afterwards was seen in Shrewsbury as part of the celebrations marking the centenary of Owen's birth.

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