Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh
3 stars
Stephen MacDonald’s World War One set two-hander about a meeting between shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Craiglockhart Hospital first appeared at The Netherbow Theatre in the 1982 Edinburgh Festival 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 so close to home was current. A quarter of a century on, and despite director John Haswell 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 the play to the site of the Netherbow almost 91 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 become the creative co-dependent of Oliver Bissett’s Sassoon. As they skirt around each other on a floor strewn with discarded scraps of verse, their passions occasionally spill into something ever so slightly physical. Awash with implied stiff-upper-lip homo-eroticism, there’s clearly something unspoken at play here.
Underscored by Ian Lowthian’s accordion soundtrack, which bridges Scots and French styles, Haswell’s take on a play he sees as being about men, and the poetic friendship between Sassoon and Owen in particular, 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 of Sassoon’s life, 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.
The Herald, November 7th 2008
ends
3 stars
Stephen MacDonald’s World War One set two-hander about a meeting between shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Craiglockhart Hospital first appeared at The Netherbow Theatre in the 1982 Edinburgh Festival 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 so close to home was current. A quarter of a century on, and despite director John Haswell 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 the play to the site of the Netherbow almost 91 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 become the creative co-dependent of Oliver Bissett’s Sassoon. As they skirt around each other on a floor strewn with discarded scraps of verse, their passions occasionally spill into something ever so slightly physical. Awash with implied stiff-upper-lip homo-eroticism, there’s clearly something unspoken at play here.
Underscored by Ian Lowthian’s accordion soundtrack, which bridges Scots and French styles, Haswell’s take on a play he sees as being about men, and the poetic friendship between Sassoon and Owen in particular, 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 of Sassoon’s life, 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.
The Herald, November 7th 2008
ends
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