Days of Significance

'Days of Significance' was written in response to 'Much Ado About Nothing', and follows the love lives and mortal fears of young soldiers departing their English market-towns for the deserts of Iraq. The first act sees two young soldiers join their friends to stumble, drink and brawl before they leave for active service; the play buzzes with the coarse jokes, insults and confrontations of a night out, though there's a nervous spark of true romance buried in the teasing confrontation. The second act sees the soldiers transferred to Iraq, where they are morally out of their depth, and fighting in a war they don't understand. Williams's play, which premiered at the Swan Theatre in 2007, looks at how the naive and malformed moral codes of these young men have catastrophic reverberations for the West's moral authority.