Zinnie Harris - Heading for a fall

Published on Friday 8 August 2008 16:01

Zinnie Harris tells Mark Fisher how the execution of Saddam Hussein provided the spark for her Traverse debut.

A FEW years ago, Zinnie Harris told me she took hardly any time to write a play. She'd sat down and written Midwinter, for example, in just two days. It sounds impressive and it puts you in mind of Alan Ayckbourn. He, too, is famously speedy, writing his hit plays in just a week or two, which is humbling until you remember he doesn't write a play every fortnight. His time at the keyboard is the end of a process that could have taken untold years of thought. It's the same with Harris. You could say she wrote her latest play, Fa l l ,

over a few weeks last autumn or you could say it was the

product of a five-year process.

"To say I write them quickly suggests they haven't been gestating for a long time," says Harris, 34. "Fall belongs to a group of plays I wrote five years ago. So in a sense it's come from something way back then and feels like a play that's been with me for quite a long time. The actual writing down is the easiest part of writing a play."

Although it stands independently, Fall is the final instalment of a loose trilogy which began with Midwinter (2004) and Solstice (2005) for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Set in the aftermath of an unnamed war, Midwinter was about a woman who trades a dead horse for a child and tells her husband returning from the war that the boy is their own. Set in the same unnamed foreign land, Solstice took place 10 years earlier, just as Midwinter's war is looming.

"They all look at different aspects of war," says Harris. "They have different seasons as titles. Solstice is before the war starts, Midwinter is the middle of a war and Fall is a little bit after it, dealing with how society moves on. Fall is a bigger play than the others perhaps because it's coming at the end."

Surprisingly, for such a lauded Edinburgh playwright, Harris is being produced by the Traverse Theatre – where she was recently appointed SAC senior playwriting fellow – for the first time. The production is auspicious for another reason: it marks the arrival of artistic director Dominic Hill, who joined the theatre this year after a celebrated run with the ensemble at Dundee Rep.

"Zinnie's play is a stunning piece about democracy, revenge and justice, about being a human being in the world," Hill told Scotland on Sunday in May. "I want work that has a wide outlook, that is provocative, thought-provoking and to some extent epic."

It's a sentiment Harris agrees with. As a writer who earns a large part of her keep from television scripts – two recent episodes of Spooks, a couple of one-off dramas and an eight-part social saga in its early stages – she relishes the opportunity theatre gives her for tackling big ideas in a public forum. The award-winning Further Than The Furthest Thing, which put her on the map in 2000, was an expansive three-hour drama about the isolated island population of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Nightingale And Chase was a two-hander about a wife-beater and a shoplifter. As a adaptor of foreign language classics she's tackled the class-war clash of Strindberg's Miss Julie for the National Theatre of Scotland and, to appear soon, the proto-feminist drama of Ibsen's A Doll's House for London's Donmar.

"In the theatre, one can pose the theoretical question, 'What if this situation that I see happening in the world were to go one step further?'" says Harris. "It's the sort of theatre that I've always been writing. What is right at the Traverse is a real encouragement to stretch your canvas and be a bit bolder, theatrically or politically."

Although Solstice, Midwinter and Fall have similar settings, they are not about the same characters and the links between them are only thematic. Solstice was concerned with the intolerance that portends the arrival of war, Midwinter considered the effect of war on our social fabric and Fall is about the question of reconciliation. Once a war is over, it asks, how do we make amends for the crimes of the past? It's an issue alive today in Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants are learning to live in peace, and in South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to absolve the crimes of the Apartheid era.

Harris felt compelled to engage with the question when examining her own feelings about the execution of Saddam Hussein in December 2006. On the one hand, she was filled with revulsion at the thought of capital punishment; on the other, she felt she had to respect the desires of a nation whose experience was so profoundly different from her own.

"The play is about how we as the rich West can't really comment unless we've lived through it," she says. "It's about the differences between justice and revenge and what our responsibilities are. It was written out of anger after they executed Saddam. My feeling was that was a mistake, but then also understanding that you can't transport yourself into that situation. There is some luxury in being able to look on it and think that it was a mistake, and actually it's for the people who lived through it to decide."

She doesn't seek to provide answers in the play, rather to explore those troublesome problems that have no neat black or white solutions. "The three plays try to work out how one can reconcile living in the West and being perfectly happy, with atrocities that are happening all the time," she says. "In Midwinter, the only way for the woman to survive the war is to keep her focus very close: this house, this room, this child. That's one extreme, like people who say they can't watch the news and close down their focus when they can't cope with it. The opposite extreme is in Fall, where we have someone who says, 'We have to bear witness, we have to really listen to what other people have lived through.' For her it's self-destructive. Somehow, in between the two is a place we have to exist. How we resolve that for ourselves is an active question that I feel will go on for my whole life."

One characteristic of the three plays is their lack of a specific setting. The atmosphere of recent conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iraq and Israel hangs heavy over them, but Harris avoids giveaway clues. This, she says, is to keep the dramatic ideas alive without getting bogged down in localised politics. "It exists in its own world, like Illyria in Twelfth Night," she says. "Theatre is about fiction, about asking, 'What if?' It feels like you ask slightly more philosophical 'what if' questions without getting into the nitty-gritty of talking about Mugabe or whoever. With any real character, people can say, 'Well, no, he wouldn't have done that.' If you want to write about the modern world, you have a choice of verbatim theatre where you present exactly what's going on – which isn't the way my writing comes out – or you have something fictional and theatrical, asking questions that turn things on their head a bit more." v

Fall, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, (0131-228 1404), until August 24 (not tomorrow or August 18), various times