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Dateline: 20th February, 2009
RSC to Tour Days The Royal Shakespeare Company is to tour Roy Williams' Iraq War play Days of Significance in October and November. The play enjoyed an initial run at the Swan Theatre in Stratford before a transfer to the Tricycle, Kilburn. Two young soldiers join their friends to binge drink the night before they leave for active service in Iraq. Their complex love lives and mortal fears directly impact on their tour of duty. The play examines the aftermath of a war whose conflicts rage far beyond the Iraqi battleground. For the Tricycle in 2008, Williams significantly re-worked the text to dramatise and acknowledge the shifting mood of a country now looking at troop withdrawal from Iraq.
RSC Company Dramaturg Jeanie O’Hare says of the changes to the play, "Roy’s play is very funny and captures the other side of the news. It is a captivating portrait of young people pitting their wits against a political war they find baffling. Roy captures the subtle moods and atmospheres of disillusion and desperation of small town life. He looks at how we make our young soldiers into extreme versions of themselves and then we dump them back into the life they left. His characters have an inventive wit, which when mixed with cigarettes, sex and alcohol becomes lethal. It drives them tumbling into an uncertain future." "Like others," Roy Williams says, "I was against the war (in Iraq), but I had no interest in writing about the people in power. I remember watching a news item on telly about young people binge drinking at the weekends in city centres across the country. I wanted to capture that image and put it on the stage … young men returning from war, first love, old love."
Days of Significance is directed by Maria Aberg who directed the original production. The production is designed by Lizzie Clachan. Full casting will be released late summer. Tour Dates
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