{THEATRE} The Wheel
Zinnie Harris returns to the Fringe with a new play about a woman forced to take a journey through a world in conflict. She talks about its genesis with Suzanne Black circle
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‘I had this idea of a woman that walks right round the world and comes back to the beginning and then gets the opportunity to play her life again. That was my premise. If we were able to go back to the moment where you have a fork in the path, would you take the other path if you knew what the outcome was?’ For her latest play, Zinnie Harris returns to the fold of the National Theatre of Scotland, for whom she adapted Strindberg as Ju l i e in 2006. What started as the seed of an idea on a sleepless night three Edinburgh Fringes ago has evolved in ‘a happy collaboration’ with its director (and the NTS’s artistic director), Vicky Featherstone. It uses a cast of Scottish actors she and Featherstone have worked with previously and choreographer Christine Devaney.
Harris reveals that her journey in the creation of this piece started with a few key images, in particular the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which King Richard banishes Henry Bolingbroke Thomas Mowbray from England. The action of the play begins with a similar banishment and follows the journey of a displaced woman (Catherine Walsh as Beatriz) shepherding a little girl on a quest to find her father. In the initial scene a wedding is torn asunder by war and the threat of foreign invaders, forcing Beatriz away from her homeland and to some very different places. and
Under a changing political climate the characters go on a physical
journey that accompanies the emotional changes in their lives: ‘They cross continents and go in and out of war zones on this almost unimaginable journey and as they go on it, because of the difficult things
they see and experience, they start to change.’ Harris has reflected on the effects of war on the individual in her trilogy of Solstice, Midwinter and Fall, and though this new play is unrelated she feels that examining the effects of the external world on the personal is a common theme in her work. In this particular case, the changes she is looking at relate to children, to how much they can be considered to be products of their environments and with whom the responsibility lies for their behaviour. The play goes back to the starting point of the journey of life, and addresses what happens when the journey strays from the path and children turn out ‘bad’.
‘As we all travel through our lives or journeys, how do we cope with the influences that are coming and the experiences that are happening to us, and how do we remain intact, particularly with children? There’s a thing that we form children but then when they turn out bad we damn them for it. The question I suppose it poses is to what extent are we implicated in the outcome of children that do atrocities or do terrible things.’
The central question for Harris is: can those changes, particularly in the child, be prevented? In that sense T h e W h e e l belongs to a tradition achieving understanding through discourse, where the worst course of action would be to respond with silence. of
Which brings us back to Richard II and the impassioned speech given by Mowbray on learning of his permanent banishment:
‘My native English, now I must forego: . . . / What is thy sentence then but speechless death / Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?’(Act I, Scene III) For Mowbray (and perhaps Harris), exile from discourse is tantamount to death. By tracing events to their origins we can learn from the past, even if, unlike Beatriz, we don’t get the chance to ‘have our time again’.
The Wheel, Traverse Theatre, 228 1404, 7–28 Aug (not 8, 15, 22), times vary, £17–£19 (£12–£13). Preview 6 Aug, £12 (£6).
Match point Gerda Stevenson’s play about conflict in its many forms gets a timely revival at the Fringe, as Kirstin Innes discovers
L A V I T S E F 72 THE LIST 4–11 Aug 2011
‘You don’t often get a chance to do something over again in theatre,’ says Gerda Stevenson, ‘to go back, once you know the text and feel comfortable with it. It’s a great opportunity.’
Stevenson’s play Federer Versus Murray originally ran for a week in 2010 at Glasgow’s Òran Mór. This new version has been recast, with Scottish legend taking over from Scottish legend (Dave Anderson takes over from Gerry Mulgrew, Stevenson herself replacing Maureen Beattie), restaged, and its script tweaked. Unfortunately, the issues it tackles are still just as relevant a year on. Stevenson uses the titular match as a way of framing different kinds
of conflict: that between married couple Jimmy and Flo (he’s recently been made redundant and is watching Wimbledon obsessively, she’s exhausted and just off night shift) and that between countries and ideologies. Jimmy and Flo are haunted by the war in Afghanistan, and by one ghost in particular, represented onstage by young saxophonist Chris Hardie.
‘I’ve always worked with music, I can’t imagine being without it,’ Stevenson says. ‘I needed a way of bringing a third character into the play, representing the crisis between the two, and music has such a spiritual quality about it.’ Fittingly, one of the tunes she’s
used is ‘The Bonnie Earl of Murray’,
about another slain soldier. ‘I was thinking about
Scottishness, about nations, about what these songs mean and what Andy Murray means,’ she says. ‘My son is 23 now – the same age as these boys who are still being killed in Afghanistan – and I remember him coming home from school one day. They’d had the army in, doing a recruitment drive with this fantastic live band, and my son himself had been incredibly tempted, until he’d heard the music teacher muttering under his breath, “Pity they didn’t tell you you could die”.’ ■ Federer Vs Murray, Assembly Hall, 623 3030, 6–28 Aug (not 15), 12.30pm, £13–£14 (£12–£13). Previews 4 & 5 Aug, £10.