National Theatre of Scotland

Interview with Zinnie Harris

Zinnie Harris was born in 1973. As well as writing for the National Theatre of Scotland, Edinburgh-based playwright and director Zinnie has written for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court. Her work includes Midwinter (2004), Further than the Furthest Thing (2000), The Chain Play (2001), and Solstice (2005). Zinnie also writes for BBC’s Spooks.

You adapted and directed Julie. Which part of you, the writer or the director, was first excited by this play and can you tell us what it was that initially excited you?

Both writer and director – the adaptation and direction seemed part of one and the same in many ways. The task was to recreate Strindberg’s Miss Julie for small venues across Scotland, so one starts to think about staging alongside the adaptation process.

My first question whenever approaching a text to adapt is to ask, is there something that I can add? If the play is perfect, and will speak as plainly now in its original form to an audience as anything I could write, then I wouldn’t embark on it. However, I felt that I could bring something, particularly in and around the characterisation of Julie herself. Strindberg, with his extraordinary preface was starting to explore the concepts of naturalism, and how a combination of genetics, upbringing and experience shapes a character, but I felt that although he talked about this in detail, when it came to his central character we were somehow outside of his creation.

We are told that midsummer is affecting her mood, but we don’t really see or feel how this has happened. Also, I found the haughty ‘little miss’ image of Miss Julie as something I wanted to challenge. I felt that a modern dramatist wouldn’t create a central character that is so unempathetic, and that the audience loathes almost from the start. When I first saw a (not very good) production of the play I was relieved that she killed herself as I couldn’t stand her, and I didn’t want anyone to feel that about my Miss Julie. The challenge to myself was that by the end, every single member of the audience would feel the tragedy of a young woman forced to take her own life.

In Strindberg's play, we are in 1890s Sweden; in Julie we are in 1920s Scotland. Can you tell us about your decision to do this – what were the parallels between the times that you wanted to explore?

I wanted to set the play against a backdrop of political change. Yes, we are still in a big house that has servants, but there is something that feels like we are at the end of an era. The First World War has happened and the working class – whether mill workers or servants – are starting to challenge their bosses. I felt that a new version of the play would benefit from this added dimension. Times of change are unsettling for everyone, particularly these three characters.

In rehearsal I was aware that it added an interesting dimension to John and Christine. They represent in my version two different views held at this time: John has sympathy for the striking men, but isn’t himself prepared or able to join them, which leaves him feeling emasculated in someway, whereas Christine thinks that striking is the beginning of the end. She likes the world as she knows it; she doesn’t want the change or the responsibility that the change will bring.

When the strike ends in failure for the workers, you feel as if John takes this as a dent in his own struggle with self-worth against the ruling class.

Miss Julie has often been discussed as a feminist text, a tragic demonstration of how women were being caged like Julie's own pet bird. But it has also been read as a  morality play – Strindberg's attempt to show the inevitable punishment that women must face if they are sexually transgressive. Where do you stand in this debate? And how do you think your version of the play engaged with this debate?

I wanted to explore the mechanism by which a woman such as Julie is trapped, not only by her sex, but by her father and the expectations of her class. I also wanted to look at the iniquity which I sill observe in expectations of women’s sexuality.

John enjoys the freedom that Julie exhibits in the bedroom, we never see, but get the feeling that whatever the sexual encounter was like, it was free and enjoyable for both of them. We might even go as far as to say, it was the only place that Julie is able to let herself go, and when they come back onto stage immediately after they are close and are held in that bubble for a time.

However, as Julie starts to become clingy and make demands of John that he increasingly can’t meet, he starts to throw her abandon back in her face, and makes her feel ashamed and low for what she has done. I wanted to expose the cruelty of this double standard, as I think it is something that has been thrown at women throughout the ages.

When it came to casting, what were you looking for in the actors for each character?

I wanted Julie to be played by someone who could be strong when she needed to be, but vulnerable and fragile. She is beautiful caged bird that breaks her own wings by flapping too hard.

John needed to be mercurial, someone who could change opinion on the roll of a dime. He should be attentive and flirtatious one minute, the next cruel and cold. He should be the sort of person that you never quite know what he is going to do next.

Christine, I wanted someone who could play security in a world view, someone solid and hard working, Christine isn’t easily thrown by events around her. She also needed inner strength to finally tell John just what she thought of him.

The play toured to 15 venues. When you began rehearsing did you have to keep this in mind all the time – and did it influence your decision to stage the play in the round?

Yes, absolutely. Working in the round offered a easy solution to the problem faced by the tour. But even if it hadn’t been necessary, I would have chosen to stage the play in this way because it allowed us a very intimate way of experiencing the characters and story. The audience felt as if they were in the same room as them – as uncomfortable at times as that turned out to be – and that there was no where to hide.

What were the difficulties of staging it in the round?

I love working in the round. I wouldn’t say there are difficulties but one has to keep being aware of the audience and who is able to see what. It tends, with my work anyway, to lead you to a more fluid way of blocking, the characters seemed to be circling each other. One critic described the production as a dance of death, and I think there was something of this in the staging.

I think the intimacy of the round also can allow great stillness however. The proximity of gesture can give it a great power.

What are the central themes in the play? Do you think there is one central theme – and how did you set about exploring them in rehearsals?

The play is about sexual politics. We see it through the lens of class politics, but really at least in my version it is a story of men and women firstly using sex to gain power, and secondly using cruelty to destroy something that could only be maintained by love.

Throughout the play, the characters – particularly John and Julie – are struggling against each other for power/ control. In the show, these struggles were brought to life through the use of proxemics. Can you discuss how you experimented with the spatial relationship between the characters and how the staging influenced this?

This feeds into the idea of the characters circling each other. In general I believe that the space between two characters is where the story is told. I am very careful with proxemics with all my productions, and the rehearsal room is where this vocabulary is found with the actors. Sam (who played Julie) and Andy (who played John) were brilliant. They had a kind of chemistry instantly and really enjoyed playing with spacial relationships on the set.

Can you discuss some of the techniques you utilised throughout the rehearsal period to develop the relationship between Julie and John.

I don’t know that there are any techniques in a rehearsal room but trial and error. Your job as director is to create an environment where experimentation and risk are possible without feeling exposed. My guiding principle is just to give something a go.

I always come in on day one with some kind of plan for the show, and that can feel quite detailed in my head, but usually it is abandoned by the end of the first week for something better. It all depends on the actors and what they bring. As the director, you are only really shaping what they are offering. Good acting is all instinctive and I was very lucky with the cast of Julie.

Some critics have dismissed the character of Miss Julie as silly and neurotic and often she has been played like this. However, Samantha Young (who played Miss Julie) presented us with a very strong-willed and empathetic Julie – how did you and Samantha work in rehearsals to create this performance?

This was very much my intention when working with the script, and of course in the casting of Sam. How did we work? It’s a difficult question. We spent six weeks with the raw material of both the script and Sam herself and somehow we talked, played, tried things out, made mistakes, came back and tried something else until we felt we had nailed the character.

There is no easy way to describe a rehearsal process. Sometimes it‘s a joy, sometimes it’s just hard work and can be boring and frustrating. A good rehearsal process is all those things at times. As a director you are totally dependant on your cast and how up they are for pushing themselves and trying new things.

The final moment in the play is incredibly powerful. We don’t see Julie shoot herself but we see John lay blood on her before she holds the gun to herself and a blackout is followed by a gunshot. For me, I found John placing blood on her incredibly symbolic – what was the thinking behind this moment? Did you want to literally implicate John in Julie's death?

I suppose partly he is implicated by the play, but also I wanted that moment to feel elegiac, that it is somehow lifted out of naturalism, that time slows down as we see the inevitable. The suicide has been coming for a while, and it is almost like I wanted us to see the consequences of the gunshot before she pulled the trigger.

Also, the way that he wiped the blood on her is sensual in itself; it parallels their intimacy. Of course John is implicated, how can he not be? She trapped herself, but he let her, just as he lets her pull the trigger. In fact she needs him to help her, she begs him to tell her what to do, she needs his strength. He is absolutely there with her in the final act – this, by the way, is different in my version to the original where she goes off stage and kills herself in the barn.

Again, I felt this wasn’t either real or the right ending – it felt too convenient, like women swooning offstage. Julie is a play where the central character kills herself at the end, and so this has to be centre stage, the final act has to be just that. On stage and in front of us.

Finally, this play is a 'classic'; it has been performed all over the world, translated and adapted many times and will undoubtedly continue to be. What is it, in your opinion, about this story that makes it appealing across time and cultures?

What could be more endlessly fascinating than politics and sex? With death thrown in at the end, it has it all. I think Julie’s journey through the play is so tragic and so self-determining, it will continue to fascinate us. Personally, as I said above, I think it says more about sexual politics between men and women than as a story about classes, and possibly this is the real secret to its appeal.

Zinnie Harris was interviewed by Catrin Evans