Premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1982 Stephen MacDonald’s play has had numerous revivals ever since. There are just two characters: Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The Great War poets met at Craiglockhart Army Hospital in Scotland in mid-August 1917 when they were both being treated for shell–shock. The play covers the same ground as Pat Barker’s Regeneration, but concentrates on the poetry, rather than the shell-shock and its treatment. There are fine performances by Simon Jenkins as Owen and Alasdair Craig as Sassoon.
Lower middle-class Owen was in awe of the aristocratic Sassoon, both as a man and as a poet. Sassoon initially thought the stuttering Owen “shy, ordinary and provincial”, but quickly recognised his talent and actively encouraged him to write about the war. MacDonald’s play, based on their poetry, letters and diaries, is not only about their mutual admiration and friendship; it is also about the making of Owen as a Great War poet.
“This book,” wrote Owen in his Preface to his War Poems, “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.”
Wilfred Owen died on 4 November, 1918, a week before armistice. He was 25. Sassoon survived the war and lived on until he was 80. He died in 1967.