A gritty look at reality of life as a soldier; A tough new drama about young people at war and play begins a national tour in Newcastle. David Whetstone talks to Roy Williams about Days of Significance.

Londoner Roy Williams nearly joined the Army at 18, seemingly on rather more than a whim.

"I seriously considered it," says the award-winning playwright.

"I went in for the interview but I stopped it before anything happened. It was really just a fleeting consideration of mine back in 1986."

Instead his life took a different course but the Army and its young soldiers are at the heart of Days of Significance, his acclaimed play which is coming to Newcastle as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2009 season.

Everyone knows the RSC does Shakespeare brilliantly but it is nice that the company is re-invigorating the Newcastle season by bringing some contemporary work.

The play is set against the war in Iraq, its protagonists being the young men in uniform and their friends and girlfriends back home.

You can't get much more contemporary than that although, this being the RSC, it has its roots in Shakespeare with the premise inspired by Much Ado About Nothing, which begins with soldiers returning from a war.

Roy says: "I very much wanted to write about two things. Firstly, how young people are viewed by society when we have this binge drinking culture. I very much wanted to capture that.

"And secondly, there were a lot of dramas going on about the war in Iraq but I got bored with what they were talking about.

"I wanted to write a play about how the war impacts on the young people who are doing the fighting and on those who stay at home."

The way Roy sees it, these people have very little control over their destiny.

"They're out there and fighting a war and people - politicians - tell them to fight and I question that. I don't question people wanting to join the Army or fight for their country but I am against the reason why they are fighting this war. I always feel that war should be the last resort but with Iraq and Afghanistan I never felt it was the last resort. Politicians wanted to fight a war and it seemed to me the decisions were taken very early."

Days of Significance premiered in Stratford in 2007 and then opened for a short season in London this year.

From what I can glean from reviews, the three acts of Days of Significance focus on periods before, during and after a tour of duty in Basra, Iraq.

The first act is set outside a nightclub where we meet Ben and the girl he fancies, Trish (the names echoing Benedick and Beatrice, the main characters in Shakespeare's Much Ado), and their friends. We're in Bigg Market territory and there's a lot of drinking and swearing.

The second act is set in Iraq, when some of the behaviour we witness is less than exemplary, and the third takes us to a wedding attended by some of the off-duty soldiers.

The play runs through with no interval but by all accounts the audience takes its seats amid scenes of rowdiness as if in an over-heated city centre night spot. I ask Roy about the dangers of portraying soldiers in a less than flattering light at a time when many of them have given their lives for their country and he says he is merely trying to reflect the way things are.

"There was one review where I was accused of being treasonous which was completely misunderstanding the piece," he says.

"We also had a question and answer session in Stratford where there was someone who had been in the Army and he was rather unflattering about the play but I think we talked him round." Roy says that some of the things his characters do in the play are awful but he hopes their behaviour also reflects badly on the people who put them in that predicament.

It is perhaps worth noting that a reviewer from The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper which has always backed the armed forces, said of Days of Significance: "Passionate, powerful and important. One of the most disturbing and persuasive portraits of young England I have ever seen."

Roy is no pacifist, as his brush with an Army career suggests. He didn't attend the huge anti-war rally in London before the troops invaded Iraq because, he quips, "I didn't want to get cold".

Seriously, though, he says he didn't want to feel pressured into adopting a black or white stance on the matter. Life is shades of grey and that is what he wanted to reflect in the play.

Days of Significance may turn out to be one of the biggest talking points in the North East which has an awful lot of young war dead to mourn.

After the play has performed at Northern Stage, it will embark on a national tour. In the meantime, Roy has a new play opening in London which takes us into equally tough territory. It is called Cat-egory B and is about the prison service. It is not, he agrees, anything like Porridge.

CAPTION(S):

REAL DRAMA RSC actors learn about soldiering from an expert. THEATRE OF WAR Roy Williams who wrote RSC play Days of Significance.