Forcing the binge issue

Roy Williams is pushing buttons again. The playwright has always had little patience with 'politically correct' thinking and, time and again, has produced vigorous, confrontational theatre as a result.

Explosive examples were 2002's Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads (about football hooliganism) and 2003's Fallout (about a racially motivated teenage murder - an adaptation airs on Channel 4 in June), both forcing audiences to confront the fault lines that run through our society.

Days Of Significance is another. First staged last year at Stratford as part of the RSC's Complete Works season, it loosely wears the plot of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, while taking a hard look at modern-day Britain through the lens of the Iraq war.

Two soldiers on the eve of their deployment binge-drink their way around town with a rowdy bunch of mates, then are plunged into the realities of war in Basra; their friends and family deal with the shocking consequences afterwards.

'One of the reviewers for the Stratford production thought the play was tantamount to treason,' says Williams, as the Muslim call to prayer echoes through the rehearsal rooms in Clapham where the cast are gearing up for the play's London premiere. 'There was also an ex-Army lieutenant at a postshow discussion who said it showed soldiers in a negative light,' he adds.

A particularly unpleasant piece of hate mail also arrived, scrawled around a copy of the aforementioned review.

But a hatchet job on 'our lads' was never the intention. Instead, Williams is again cutting through the rhetoric to consider how the powerless in our society are affected by decisions that lie out of their control.

'I wanted to look at how we're asking our young to fight this war thousands of miles away and impose our morality on these countries, yet we encourage those same young, particularly working-class, people to drink themselves to death at weekends,' he explains.

And it is, Williams wants us to acknowledge, the very young men and women who are vilified for terrorising town centres across the land who make up the bulk of our Armed Forces.

This is by no means a new phenomenon - it was, for example, an argument raised in the US in the wake of the Vietnam War. 'It's very much the point Oliver Stone was making in Platoon,' says Williams. 'These people are considered the dregs of society; they come from poor towns, they don't have jobs or careers - and they are always the kind of people we send out to fight.'