Zinnie Harris

Zinnie Harris FRSE is a British playwright, screenwriter and director currently living in Edinburgh.

She has been commissioned and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Her plays have been translated and performed in many countries across Europe and the globe.

Harris was born in Oxford and brought up in Scotland.

She studied zoology at Oxford University, followed by an M.A. in Theatre Direction at Hull University.

Alongside her original plays, Zinnie Harris has adapted and reworked a number of plays from the western dramatic canon revising female characters from those plays for a more contemporary and sympathetic eye.

The play tells the story of the island of Tristan da Cunha and its inhabitants following a volcanic eruption in 1961.

It won an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, the Peggy Ramsay Award, and the John Whiting Award and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

The actress Paola Dionisotti won the Evening Standard Best Actress Award for her performance as Mill in the original production.

In the same year Harris was shortlisted for the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award.

Further than the Furthest Thing has been translated into multiple languages and performed across the globe, often being described as a "modern classic".

Harris's play By Many Wounds was produced by Hampstead Theatre in 1999, and was shortlisted for the Allied-Domecq and Meyer-Whitworth playwriting awards.

Her second play, Further than the Furthest Thing was directed by Irina Brown and co-produced by the Tron Theatre, Glasgow and the Royal National Theatre, London in 2000.

Her next play Nightingale and Chase, was produced by the Royal Court Theatre, London 2001 and co-commissioned by Clean Break.

A trilogy of plays followed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh - Solstice (2005), Midwinter (2004) and Fall (2008).

Midwinter was given an Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for playwriting and shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

It has been performed many times in translation, notably at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden (2005) and at La Cartoucherie, Paris (2010).

Harris adapted and directed Julie, an adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie, for the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006.

For the Donmar Warehouse, London, she adapted Ibsen's A Doll's House in 2009, relocating the setting to Downing Street in 1909, exploring politics and scandal.

By coincidence, Harris's new version opened in the week the Westminster MP's expenses scandal broke in the UK press.

Gillian Anderson played the role of Nora, and Christopher Eccleston the part of Kelman (Krogstad).

Harris has written a number of shorter plays; The Garden for the Traverse Theatre (2010); The Panel for the Tricycle Theatre London for the Women, Power and Politics Season (2010); and From Elsewhere: The Message / From Elsewhere: On the Watch for the Tricycle Theatre as part of The Bomb: a Partial History Season (2012).

In 2011 the National Theatre of Scotland commissioned and performed The Wheel, directed by Vicky Featherstone.

The play won an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, was joint winner of the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, and shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

A subsequent production opened at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in April 2013 in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland.

The Wheel had its U.S. debut at the Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago in 2013, directed by Tina Landau and starring Joan Allen.

Harris' play Solstice had its U.S. debut at the Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago in January 2014, directed by Karen Kessler.

How to Hold Your Breath (2015) challenges the notion of the ‘everyman’ and Meet me at Dawn (2017) dramatizes the relationship between two women in an examination of grief.

In 2015, The Royal Court Theatre produced Harris's new play, How To Hold Your Breath at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

It starred Maxine Peake and Michael Schaeffer and was directed by Vicky Featherstone.

It imagined the fall of Europe and what would happen to the Western privileged values and outlook if Europeans became the next wave of refugees.

It was awarded the Berwin-Lee Award for playwriting in 2016.

The play went on to have multiple productions in translation in Turkey, Greece, France and Sweden.

This Restless House was commissioned and produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Citizens Theatre in 2016 and directed by Dominic Hill.

This trilogy of plays was inspired by Aeschylus' Oresteia and retells the ancient story placing the women at the centre of the story.

Among these adaptations, This Restless House (2017), Harris’ version of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, imagines Clytemnestra not as someone capable of murder, but as a woman more like herself with no intention to kill.

Her play Macbeth (an undoing) (February 2022) revisits Lady Macbeth as a ‘complex woman intoxicated by love, power and maternal longing; a woman out of time, fighting against the constraints of medieval patriarchy.’

Similarly, in The Duchess (of Malfi), her adaptation of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the duchess is given the final word as Webster’s text is rewoven to examine the control and violence of men towards women.

In her version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Julie is a character with actions of those of a child who is scared of and has been coerced by her father.

Harris’ original plays also put female characters at the centre of the narrative.