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The Review - THEATRE by SARAH FOX
Published: 20 March 2008

Days of Significance: Lorraine Stenley (Gail) Luke Norris (Dan), Simon Harrison (Steve), Jamie Davis (Ben) and Craig Gallivan (Jamie)

Choreography of yobbery

DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE
TricyleTheatre

FROM a puke-spattered town centre on a Saturday night to a blood-stained bunker in Basra, this play follows the brutal arc of young soldiers’ involvement in the sort of Abu Ghraib atrocity that provokes shocked disgust among a remotely naive home front.
It’s an unconventional war morality play. Although it follows two of the central characters from their last night on the town into Iraq, all the nihilistic protagonists are brutalised long before their exposure to the battlefield, stripped down to aggression and sentimentality by the relentless crudeness of binge culture.
They moon, they vomit, fight and insult. With luck, they make it – but even having won their fair one’s charms, they shed any stain of gallantry by swiftly branding their temporary mate a slapper or a skank-faced slag.
When the two soldiers are discovered huddling scared in a firefight their gutter programming outside Yates’s Wine Lodge kicks in.
One labels the Iraqi child he has just shot a maggot; the other finds escape in the code of always following orders.
The atrocity, which the audience never sees, is just around the
corner.
Writer Roy Williams wrote Days of Significance as a “response” to Much Ado About Nothing, part of an RSC season of 21st century re-evaluations of Shakespeare’s drama.
His rendering of the flirtatious interplay of Shakespeare’s lovers into the street talk of Little Britain is brilliant, and the production’s choreography of yobbery is superb. Compared with his evocation of a provincial precinct running with Stella, his depiction of the battlefield splashed with blood is unconvincing, and he captures the language and attitudes of the army with far less accuracy than those of the civilians.
But this 90-minute play, with its excellent supporting cast and fine central performances, asks all the right questions.
Until March 29
CNJ Booking line0870 040 0070

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