Not About Heroes

A familiar catch-22 lies at the heart of Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes - a two-hander about the friendship between war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Art, courage and madness are the primary themes of a play that suggests a somewhat unconventional motive for participating in battle: for war poets, it was research.

Set in the war hospital at Craiglockhart where both men were treated for 'mental conditions' during the First World War, the play supposes that Owen's friendship with Sassoon not only shaped his writing, but also gave him the strength (and perhaps the courage) to return to the front line, where he was killed at the age of 25, just a week before the end of the war.

The Byre Theatre's production, with Simon Roberts as Sassoon and Leon Williams as Owen, provides a believable and unsentimental portrayal of the pair's relationship. Their journey from stammering fan and crotchety superior to confident poet and privileged mentor is smoothly charted by MacDonald's script, although it's not clear why director Stephen Wrentmore (or possibly the playwright) felt the need to play the scene in which they part twice, as nothing is gained from the repetition.

For the most part, Not About Heroes requires little in the way of prior background knowledge of the two poets - the script is peppered with nuggets of information as well as Owen's letters to his mother. In terms of poetry, this is really Owen's story, and it is mainly his work that we hear (boldly delivered, and followed by increasingly falsely modest solicitations of advice).

The actual process of writing - painstaking and for the most part solitary - generally doesn't lend itself well to theatre, but MacDonald incorporates the pair's well-documented collaboration to exhilarating effect, with Sassoon instigating a re-drafting of Anthem for Dead Youth, as it once was titled.

Two strong performances, a handsome set by Yoon Bae and above all a great, multi-dimensional script make for two hours of inspiring theatre.