Rowan Tree Theatre Company
Reviews of Not About Heroes
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It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast with the Traverse’s new play that Not About heroes, Stephen MacDonald’s 1982 drama about the friendship between the First World War poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The Scottish Borders Rowan Tree Company (which is celebrating its 21st year) is touring the piece around Scotland.
Set in and around the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh – the medical facility for British Army officers at which Owen and Sassoon met – the piece is a carefully constructed montage of letters, poems and imagined dialogues and monologues. As such its structure is somewhat rigid and a little creaky at times.
The play is saved, however, by its fascinating characters And their enduringly powerful (and relevant) verse. Oliver Bisset’s Sassoon is a little static, but gives a lovely sense of his sharp wit and self-deprecating sarcasm. In a performance tarnished by accent slippage, Matthew Burgess nevertheless succeeds in evoking the diffidence of the star-struck Owen as he is befriended by his mentor.
Mark Brown
THE HERALD
Stephen MacDonald’s First World War-set two-hander about a meeting between shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Craiglockhart Hospital was first produced at the Netherbow Theatre during the 1982 Edinburgh Fringe. Its appearance must have seemed timely. The Thatcherite triumph of the Falklands War was fresh, and the notion that young lives could be lost was current. A quarter of a century on, and despite director John Haswell’s programme note disclaimer, MacDonald’s play looks more prescient than ever.
It’s fitting, then, that Haswell’s production for the Borders-based Rowan tree company returns to the site of the Netherbow almost 90 years to the day since peace was declared. It’s a quietly exquisite affair, in which Matthew Burgess’s Owen moves from literary groupie to be the creative co-dependent of Oliver Bisset’s Sassoon. As they skirt around each other, their passions occasionally spill into something physical. Awash with implied stiff-upper-lip homo-eroticism, there’s something unspoken here.
Underscored by Ian Lowthian’s accordion sound track, Haswell’s take on a play he sees as being about men, and about the poetic friendship between Sassoon and Owen, accentuates its intimacy.
This is managed in a way that Gillies Mackinnon’s big-screen version of Pat Barker’s novel regeneration, which looked at the same period, never quite managed.
When the Rowan Tree tour Not About Heroes to the site of Craiglockhart hospital itself this weekend, it will be a poetic gesture of some magnitude.
