NOT ABOUT HEROES
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This statement, which could have come from an exceptionally well-spoken opponent of American involvement in Vietnam, was made in July 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon–aristocrat, dilettante, writer, and war hero, who had earned the nickname “Mad Jack” for his bravery when a sniper’s wound sent him home from the French front. The protest–quite a change of heart from a poet who had written not long before that “war has made us wise / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free”–stirred up considerable debate in Parliament and the press. Hoping to downplay the controversy rather than enflame it with a court-martial, the army packed Sassoon off to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment of his nervous disorder.
There he met a shell-shocked young officer named Wilfred Owen, who had tried to capture in verse his horrific experiences in the trenches and his evolving opposition to a war that England’s political and religious establishments were promoting as a holy crusade. The two writers struck up a fond mentor/pupil relationship–whose dynamics gradually shifted as Sassoon, who had enough taste to be aware of the limits of his own talents, came to realize that the still-raw Owen was an incipient artist of major proportions.
Unfortunately, Pennell is inadequately matched by David New. He plays Owen as a sort of straight-and-narrow, simple-hearted Sergeant York type rather than the prissy, hypersensitive, slightly pompous fellow even sympathetic contemporaries described. Perhaps it was just the performance I saw, but New and Pennell lacked electricity. And in seeking to avoid arty affectation, New recites Owen’s poems with little regard for their musicality or moral intensity while Pennell, with his beautiful diction, I conveys the verses’ heightened feeling without ever succumbing to hamminess.
