Marriage of dramatic talents

IT'S NOT every interview that gets interrupted by the delivery of a box of Lego. But at the Edinburgh home of John and Zinnie Harris real life carries on even as Death Of A Scientist, their collaboration on Scottish Opera's Five:15 series, reaches fruition.

Unlike the other collaborators – such as composer Stuart MacRae and novelist Louise Welsh – on this compilation of five 15-minute operas, John and Zinnie have been unable to leave their work in the office. Their opera has taken shape in between family meals, day trips and ordering building bricks for their two young sons.

"There was that dreadful thing where we were lying in bed one morning thinking about what the story should be," says John. "The kids are pretty sick of it. I'll say: 'What are we going to have for supper? Oh, by the way, the third line of the opera…'"

Zinnie requests I don't mention the bit about bed in case it comes out wrong, but neither of them is really complaining. Every artist lives and breathes their work, so it's actually a great advantage to have your creative partner with you at all times. "If you're working with somebody outside the house, you have meetings every third Tuesday in a caf," says Zinnie. "Here, it becomes more part of what you're living with. The early creation of the opera was long car journeys driving on holiday. It's nice because one can keep revisiting it in an informal way and things can evolve organically."

Theatregoers will know Zinnie as the author of last summer's Traverse play Fall and her early hit Further Than The Furthest Thing. The more eagle-eyed will have spotted her as a script writer on Spooks, which she's working on again at the moment. In May, Gillian Anderson will star in her adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House at London's Donmar Warehouse. "I was really surprised at how lovely she was," she says of The X Files star. "You go to a meeting feeling a little bit star-struck and you come out having really giggled and had a laugh and feeling like you've found a friend. Her input has always been spot on."

If music is your bag then John will be familiar from his days as artistic director of the Paragon Ensemble and for his record label Seven Things. This season at the Traverse Theatre he's running Noisy Nights, a bi-monthly programme of freshly composed five-minute scores. "It means composers get to hear their music played by a crack band," he says. "I've already had submissions from Italy, France and Germany, and some are looking very interesting indeed."

John also has an extensive CV as a theatre composer which is how he and Zinnie met. Although the two have worked on several plays together, Death Of A Scientist is the first time they have collaborated as equals on a joint project; she as librettist, he as composer.

The opera is about the suicide in 2003 of the weapons expert David Kelly after he had been interviewed by journalist Andrew Gilligan in the course of exposing the Government's dodgy dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It was a story that appealed to the Harrises for its combination of familiarity, topicality and high emotion.

"A lot of successful operas take a story the audience is already familiar with and use the music to explore it emotionally," Zinnie says. "You want an opera that takes you to the heart of the drama. When you see operas about banal events there's a mismatch with the electricity of the music. You need to find the crisis where one would sing. Also in the Kelly story, there's such a weird contrast between a sunny day, a walk in the woods and this man's decision to kill himself with the weight of the world on his shoulders."

In this material, they felt there was a 15-minute journey. The Scottish Opera format is too short to explore the wider politics of the story, but just right to capture the turbulence of Kelly's mind. "You couldn't dramatise the going to war of Blair and Bush in 15 minutes," says Zinnie. "So what we've focused on is the emotional decisions of this one man in trauma. Because he's a symbol of that moment, it's easy to forget the tragedy for that person. We've stripped everything else away so you've just got the emotion."

The people Kelly meets on his walk act as sounding boards as he makes the agonising decision to kill himself. In this they are like the archetypal figures of myth. "It generalises and becomes about the decision of anybody to take their own life," says John. "Everybody who takes their own life has pressures on their shoulders. What could that emotional state feel like?" v

Five:15, ran Mr, Glasgow, Friday until Sunday; The Hub, Edinburgh, March, 7-8 www.scottishopera.org.uk