Who knows what private nightmares were endured at Craiglockhart, the military rehabilitation centre established outside Edinburgh for the treatment of shell-shocked officers during the first world war? Pat Barker made a brilliant surmise in the first novel of her Regeneration trilogy, which principally focused on Siegfried Sassoon’s relationship with his therapist, WH Rivers.
Sassoon’s fellow war poet and fellow patient Wilfred Owen was a tantalisingly peripheral figure in the novel; the inconspicuous, unpublished son of a railwayman who hesitantly approached the more established writer to express admiration, in return for the occasional poetry workshop. Stephen MacDonald’s intimate two-hander, first produced in 1983, is a deft illustration of the process by which the protege rapidly came to eclipse the master, while suggesting that Sassoon’s emendations to Owen’s work may have been his own most significant literary achievement.
The difficulty lies in bestowing credibility, not to mention dramatic momentum, on the slow, cerebral business of writing poetry. Barker reverse-engineered her fictional versions of Owen’s unedited drafts: MacDonald has Sassoon counselling Owen on the Craiglockhart lawn in the gently chiding tone of a housemaster correcting a pupil’s homework.
Tim Baker’s production creates an engaging delineation between two entirely different personalities united by a common vocation and some truly hellish experiences. Daniel Llewelyn-Williams’s slightly irascible Sassoon carries the doomed hauteur of a man whose mother’s appreciation of Wagner left him “condemned to heroism from the font”; Owain Gwynn’s understated Owen is a figure who shoulders genius lightly, as if uncertain he warrants the burden of genius at all. But it is the recitations of Owen’s poems that carry the most impact, even if it did require Sassoon to knock them into shape.
• Until 29 November. Box office: 0845 330 3565. Venue: Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold.
