BWW Reviews: NOT ABOUT HEROES, The Unicorn Theatre, October 14 2010

"My subject is war, and the pity of war" - Wilfred Owen.

First staged in the post-Falklands militaristic atmosphere of the summer of 1982, Stephen MacDonald's play as performed in 2010, when every week sees the names of fallen servicemen recited in the Palace of Westminster, has a very different resonance and is all the better for it. Though not yet as searingly etched into the collective consciousness as Passchendaele, Helmand Province is beginning to acquire the same characteristics of unending death in a foreign land with little sign of a realistic endgame in sight. Even amongst the baggy-panted, T-shirted and iPodded teenagers in the Unicorn Theatre audience, the fact that war is a machine for piling up corpses rather than something over which one should "rejoice, rejoice" (as Mrs Thatcher implored a nation to do in 1982) is surely a message that needs no underlining.

So, shorn of its need to debunk the view of war as an engine of glory, Not About Heroes becomes something more personal, more nuanced - the study of a relationship initially grounded in art, that grows in the intense hothouse of impending death into something more passionate, but unrequited. Wilfred Owen, 24 and bursting with poetry, finds himself in Craiglockhart Hospital with other shell-shocked officers being rehabilitated before despatch once more into the Flanders mincing machine. There he meets his hero, Siegfried Sassoon, who has been parked there by top brass for his seditious statements about a war that he accepted was once fought for freedom, but now believed was prolonged through heartless apathy. Sassoon, having initially rebuffed Owen as another fanboy scribbler, becomes first impressed by the odd phrase, then transfixed by the force of Owen's poetry and then fascinated by the boy-man, every day, eagerly before him. Owen, though never wavering in his all-consuming admiration of Sassoon, becomes more worldly in 1917 London society, but, hungry for the legitimacy Sassoon's battlefield actions and the romantically discarded medals so earned, fails to heed his own warnings and, like the Youth of his celebrated Anthem, is doomed to be killed in the field, just one week before Armistice is declared.

With a set comprising little more than two chairs, two desks and a set of golf clubs, Russell Bright, resembling Owen uncannily, and Rupert Wickham, older than Sassoon was at the time (but that was a time when men grew old very quickly) hold the audience with the drama of their growing relationship and the beauty of the poetry. The fare is rich indeed - not for the first time when poetry is spoken within a play, I found myself wishing for a rewind button to hear the stanzas again (and again) - but the charisma of both actors draws the audience into the personal underpinning the political, the spirit of life amidst the production of death, the art rising from the ashes.

In pitching this work at a teenage audience, the Unicorn Theatre is again demonstrating its willingness to push the boundaries and challenge what can be expected of a generation more used to the sensory overload of the popcorn and popguns of the multiplex. As usual, Not About Heroes shows that if the art is good enough, that challenge will be met.

Not About Heroes is at The Unicorn Theatre until Sunday October 17 and subsequently on tour around the UK.

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