Not About Heroes - Wilfred Owen - Siegfried Sassoon - Radio Drama - WW1

Here's "Not About Heroes" a Radi0 play circa 1983 about the first meeting of the two World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The play tells the story of two of the great poets of the first world war. Siefreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen meet while recovering at the Craiglockhart military hospital for mental trauma (shell shocked officers). The story is told partly in 'flashback' as Sassoon refllects on their friendship. Owen begins as a fan of Sassoon's poetry and they gradually build up their friendship polishing Owen's work for publication. The play contains some beautiful language, not just the poetry, and illustrates the pointless nature of war and the way in which it destroys anything of Beauty..

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.[1]

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.[2] 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.