The night before they depart for active service, two young soldiers embark on a drunken night out in an English market town. Their bravado is soon crushed by their tour of duty, and when they return home, civilian life is as alien as the desert they left behind.

This is the storyline of Roy Williams’s play Days of Significance, which tours to the Oxford Playhouse from October 27-31 in a Royal Shakespeare Company production.

With the wars in Iraq and now Afganistan coming under ever-increasing scrutiny, many playwrights must be working on this subject matter. What, I asked RSC artistic director Michael Boyd, attracted him to Roy Williams’s play in particular?

“One of the great things about Days of Significance is that it took the shape it did entirely in Roy’s brain. It began as an exercise in using Much Ado About Nothing as an inspiration for a contemporary play. Roy got excited by the idea of soldiers coming back from war, and he inverted that into soldiers going off to war. Then, for the first revival, he rewrote the play, and included a return from war scene.

‘It’s an extraordinary piece in that it straddles a sort of classic timelessness in its Shakespearean provenance, with quite frightening contemporary, visceral, rude reality. The play also contains a very thoughtful, humane counting of the cost of war – especially the cost to individual young people.

“That’s what I liked about the play. It started off in our Complete Works festival, as a contemporary piece inspired by Shakespeare, and has been doing very well with audiences since then: we’ve already revived it twice. We now feel it deserves to be seen out and about, on tour.”