Days of Significance

Synopsis

Written in response to Much Ado About Nothing, Days of Significance is set in market-town England and the deserts of Iraq. Two young soldiers join their friends to binge drink the night before they leave for active service. Their complex love lives and mortal fears directly impact on their tour of duty. Roy Williams looks at how the naive and malformed moral codes of these young men have catastrophic reverberations for the West's moral authority.

Our Review:

19 March 2008

It is good to see the Royal Shakespeare Company at least trying to shake up its new writing policy by placing playwrights alongside the house dramatist. Leo Butler’s response to The Tempest, I’ll Be the Devil, was a messy misfire, but Roy Williams’ raw and disturbing Days of Significance, bouncing off Much Ado About Nothing, is a stunning triptych of disillusion, pain and grim rioting among a group of white British market town youngsters caught up in a distant war they barely comprehend.

Instead of returning from a military campaign, as in Much Ado, Ben and Jamie are departing for Basra, and Ben’s “merry war of words” with his Beatrice, or Trish, is part of a drink-fuelled, obscenely conducted face-off between lads and “ladettes” outside a nightclub, with much joshing of the police and gruesome display of private parts.

This first half-hour of brawling, vomiting, strutting and foul-mouthed badinage is one of the mo...

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