'Not About Heroes' - a century since the end of the war to end all wars

Everyone should read the poetry of Wilfred Owen. His war poems should be required reading for every politician before they are elected.

The current touring production of Stephen Macdonald's magnificent play Not About Heroes is a moving and deeply emotional portrayal of the relationship between Owen and fellow war poet and campaigner Siegfried Sassoon.

There was one moment - as Sassoon (Daniel Llewellyn Williams) sweeps a pile of poems and letters off his desk and onto the stage - when you could hear a pin drop in Letchworth's Broadway Theatre. It was one of those pieces of physical action that is a metaphor for the pointless destruction of life that is at the heart of the play. And, indeed, at the heart of both Sassoon and Owen's poetry.

Owen himself (played brilliantly by Owain Gwynn) is a man driven by the need to experience war in order to tell of its brutality. The entire poem slips between poetry and letters, with the relationship between the men themselves depicted in their own words.

We are approaching the centenary of Owen's death a year after he was released from Craiglockhart War Hospital and a week before the end of the war. It's fitting that Not About Heroes is touring the country now, and I suspect the performance in London on 4 November will be a particularly difficult one for the two actors.