Days of Significance [Paperback]

Written in response toMuch Ado About Nothingand performed by Dominic Cooke'sPericlesandThe Winter's TaleCompany, Roy Williams'Days of Significanceis 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.

Roy Williams was the first recipient of the Alfred Fagon Award for Starstruck in 1997 which also won the John Whiting Award for the same year. His other plays include Josie's Boys, Night and Day, Home Boys which was broadcast on Radio 4 and Lift Off (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs). His more recent work includes The Gift (Birmingham Rep/Tricycle Theatre 2000), Clubland (Royal Court 2001), Little Sweet Thing (2005), and Slow Time (developed as part of the National Theatre's education programme, 2005).

Williams has a remarkable talent for engineering unforced, truthful-seeming collisions between tragic emotion and irrelevant or blithely disreputable comedy Independent - Paul Taylor

Days of Significance is a frankly terrifying and utterly compelling examination of the morality of sending young men to fight a war when they are ill-equipped to do so in every way Guardian - Michael Billington

Brace yourself: this is tough, important stuff, alarmingly well done Mail on Sunday - Georgina Brown

Williams, while he does not exonerate the behaviour of the soldiers, draws an immensely compassionate portrait of people propelled into hell Financial Times - Sarah Hemming

Here is a state-of-the-nation playls