The power of words and love between two men is at the core of this play set during World War I.
Stephen MacDonald’s 1980s drama is based on true events surrounding the meeting in 1917 of poet Siegfried Sassoon (Ali Watt) and aspiring poet Wilfred Owen (Thomas Cotran) at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital. While Owen had been admitted for shell shock, Sassoon is there for altogether different reasons. He is there as a silencing mechanism since the publication of his anti-war text Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration. Sassoon’s tutoring leads to the pupil surpassing the teacher in writing skills as friendship and feeling deepens between the men.
This production from Eden Court is set against the backdrop of a giant hanger door and big upended paving stones in the foreground as the war’s dark rumblings thunder the background. The main actors perform a kind of reverse strip side stage as they don their WWI officers’ uniforms– a reminder of the human beings beneath the faҫades. Some delay in lights going down encouraged unneeded chat in the audience that dulled the drama’s opening though elsewhere in the piece the otherwise subdued lighting cast emblematic giant shadows of these poetic giants.
Each act is styled differently. The first is more formal involving some direct narration, the reading of correspondence and some duets of poems that work quite well. Act two contains some muscular choreography that reflects the poignancy of war’s pain but also the closer and more honest relationship that has developed between the two. Earlier clumsy pirouetting could also stand for their male repression and awkwardness at intimacy, either physical or emotional, in an otherwise stifled environment. Either way it sits a little ill.
Ali Watt captures the tense pomposity and inherent frozen warmth of the C.O. class that Sassoon belonged to and Thomas Cotran convinces as the eager, stammering, star struck Owen but paying quiet attention throughout is officers’ batman Ewan Petrie. Moving furniture with military precision, he provides on- stage sound effects then silently sorts and burnishes in the background staying utterly in character throughout as the symbolically forgotten foot soldier.
Human beings haven’t learned much from past errors as can be seen on the news every day so this play still stands as a necessary reminder not just of the ‘pity of war’ but of a love that ‘dared not speak its name’. Contrary to its title, this play is undoubtedly about heroes.
Fri 09/10/15 & Sat 10/10/15 The Traverse,Edinburgh
Wed 14/10/15 Pitlochry Town Hall
Thu 15/10/15 Strathearn Art Space, Crieff
Fri 16/10/15 Macphail Centre Ullapool
Sat 17/10/15 Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye
Tue 20/10/15 Lossiemouth Town Hall
Wed 21/10/15 Lyth Arts- Wick
Thu 22/10/15 Carneagie Hall Clashmore
Fri 23/10/15 Victoria Hall, Cromarty (Tbc)
Sat 24/10/15 Fort George, Ardersier (Tbc)