Newly-discovered painting by poet Wilfred Owen to star in stage drama

Now a newly-discovered watercolour by the Oswestry-born war poet is to feature in the set of a new stage drama based on his life.

The painting, which shows a fishing boat, was found in a car boot sale in Spain.

It has now been returned to Britain and will be used in a new play called Vilomah, which is based on Owen's mother's reaction to the loss of her son at the end of the war.

Dean Johnson, founder of The Wilfred Owen Story Museum in Birkenhead, said the painting had only recently come to light.

"A family contacted me and sent me a picture of the painting asking if I could help with information," he said,

"They were relatives of someone who lived in Spain and had picked up the painting at a car boot sale a few years ago in Spain.

"The painting was passed on to this family, who wanted me to find out more about it. I ran it past a few Owen experts and it seems to be genuine."

The watercolour was initially believed to show somewhere off the coast of Liverpool or North Wales. But Mr Johnson said a clue in the way Owen signed the painting had led him to have other ideas.

"It's been suggested to me that it's a painting he did in Scarborough where he was convalescing after suffering from shellshock," he said. "It's strange because one of the puzzling things is that his signature is slightly different, but when he went to the war hospital in Edinburgh before he went to Scarborough, for some reason he altered his signature at some point, and that seems to confirm that it was done about that time, about a year before his death."

Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893, in Oswestry and spend his childhood in Shropshire before going to school in Birkenhead.

He was killed while serving in Sambre–Oise Canal, France, on November 4, 1918, just a week before the end of the war.

The play is being performed at the Lantern Theatre in Liverpool tomorrow and Friday.