Photo: Castaways
Due to circumstances beyond producer Bottom Dog’s control, the fourth and final of Four War Plays will not proceed on Monday December 1. Apologies to supporters of this excellent theatrical series dedicated to invoking the horrors and aftermath of World War 1, 100 years later.
The missing element was to be Stephen MacDonald’s ‘Not About Heroes’, an imaginary look at the real friendship between poets Siegried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen whilst hospitalised in Edinburgh, 1917.
Indeed, the drive behind the staging of this ‘read-only’ quartet at No. 1 Pery Hotel might well have been from Owen’s preface to 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.”
