Days of Significance

by Roy Williams

Overview

Written in response to Much Ado About Nothing and performed by Dominic Cooke's Pericles and The Winter's Tale Company, Roy Williams' 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408148150
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/16/2013
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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).
Roy Williams, OBE, worked as an actor before turning to writing full-time in 1990. He graduated from Rose Bruford in 1995 with a first class BA Hons degree in Writing and participated in the 1997 Carlton Television screenwriter's course. The No Boys Cricket Club (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1996) won him nominations for the TAPS Writer of the Year Award 1996 and for New Writer of the Year Award 1996 by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. He was the first recipient of the Alfred Fagon Award 1997 for Starstruck (Tricycle Theatre, London, 1998), which also won the 31st John Whiting Award and the EMMA Award 1999. Lift Off (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1999) was the joint winner of the George Devine Award 2000. His other plays include: Night and Day (Theatre Venture, 1996); Josie's Boys (Red Ladder Theatre Co., 1996); Souls (Theatre Centre, 1999); Local Boy (Hampstead Theatre, 2000); The Gift (Birmingham Rep/Tricycle Theatre, 2000); Clubland (Royal Court, 2001), winner of the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for the Most Promising Playwright; Fallout (Royal Court Theatre, 2003) which was made for television by Company Pictures/Channel 4; Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (National Theatre, 2002, 2004), Little Sweet Thing (New Wolsey, Ipswich/ Nottingham Playhouse/Birmingham Rep, 2005), Slow Time (National Theatre Education Department tour, 2005), Days of Significance (Swan Theatre, Stratfordupon- Avon, 2007), Absolute Beginners (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 2007), Joe Guy (Tiata Fahodzi/Soho Theatre, 2007), Baby Girl (National Theatre, 2007), Out of the Fog (Almeida Theatre, 2007), There's Only One Wayne Matthews (Polka Theatre, 2007), Category B (Tricycle Theatre, 2009) and Sucker Punch (Royal Court, 2010). He also contributed A Chain Play (Almeida Theatre, 2007) and Sixty Six (Bush Theatre, 2011). His screenplays include Offside, winner of a BAFTA for Best Schools Drama 2002. His radio plays include Tell Tale, Homeboys, Westway, which was broadcast as part of Radio 4 First Bite Young Writers' Festival, To Sir with Love, and The Interrogation. He also wrote Babyfather for BBC TV. He was awarded the OBE for Services to Drama in the 2008 Birthday Honours List.

Editorial Reviews

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 play in which Williams leaves his comfort zone of writing about the black community and stretches himself imaginatively with terrific results” —Tribune - Aleks Sierz

From the Publisher