‘Not About Heroes’ First World War goes on tour

The national tour of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon begins next month taking in eighteen venues in the UK and France.

This Autumn, the awarding winning Feelgood Theatre takes to the road with the drama that charts the extraordinary friendship of two men whose poetry became the voice of a lost generation and a world changed forever.

The national tour and West End run of Stephen MacDonald’s play Not About Heroes opens at Craiglockhart War Hospital where the two met and goes on to tour significant venues in the poets lives, including Owen’s home town of Shrewsbury and a performance by special invitation of the Mayor of Ors at The Wilfred Owen Memorial at The Foresters House in France.

Here, on the 31st October 1918 Wilfred spent his last few nights in a smoky cellar and wrote his last letter home. The show concludes in the West End at Trafalgar Studios just a stone’s throw from London’s Cenotaph.

 “I am delighted that Feelgood are touring a new production of this wonderful play; we couldn’t ask for a better company to do justice to Wilfred and Siegfried’s story. I urge people to see it, especially in the places that were special in the lives of Owen and Sassoon, as this adds a level of intimacy and reality.” – Samuel Grey of the Wilfred Owen Association

Weaving together their poetry, letters, and autobiographical writings including Anthem for Doomed Youth and Mental Cases, the work celebrates the indomitable spirit of friendship and offers an insight into courage, love and humanity in the face of war.

Alongside special workshops, the production will be performed at Catterick Garrison to children of army personnel, veterans and service men and women recovering from the traumas of war.

The tour is accompanied by a national poetry competition to find the war poets of today. With the actor Jason Isaacs as patron, Whispers of War aims to find the war poets of today by building a link between the First World War and the 21st Century and encouraging amateur poets from the military and civilian community to work together to create bridges of understanding through the written word. The competition winners will be invited to a special ceremony in London and an online anthology published as a legacy of new perspectives.

1917. After protesting against the continuance of the war, Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero and celebrated poet is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital to silence him. There he meets shell-shocked Lt Wilfred Owen and they begin a friendship that transforms them both and creates some of the greatest war poetry of the twentieth century. Returning to the front, Sassoon was shot in the head but survived. Owen went on to win the military cross, but was machine-gunned to death at the Sambre Canal, near Ors, seven days before the Armistice.

Full tour date details and prices can be found at www.notaboutheroes.com