Playwright Zinnie Harris makes directing debut with short film A Glimpse

Harris is best known, perhaps, as a playwright. I’m far from being the only theatre lover who considers her debut play on the Scottish stage, Further Than the Furthest Thing (which was inspired liberally by her mother’s early childhood on the remote, south Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha), to be among the finest stage works ever written by a Scottish ­dramatist.

An exceptional theatre artist though she is, Harris does not confine her writing to the stage. She has, over the years, written various works for television, including a stint on the popular BBC spy drama ­series Spooks.

Now, with the Covid-19 pandemic in its second year and the reopening of playhouses still a distant hope, the dramatist is relieved that her artistic drive has taken her, for the first time, into film directing. Her debut short film, A Glimpse, premieres tomorrow as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts ­Festival, and will be streamed online until May 23.

When I meet Harris in one of Edinburgh’s newly reopened coffee houses, she is characteristically modest and matter-of-fact, yet palpably excited, in discussing her film. Set in a regular flat, the 16-minute movie stars excellent actors Kirsty Stuart and ­Jordan Young (along with child performers Ella Thorne and Leo Thorne).

Stuart plays Kate, a young mother of two who, while thinking back to the anguished days of her lost pregnancy, discovers a connection to her younger self. While putting things in the attic, Harris explains, Kate “finds a little portal into herself four years previously”.

The writer and director has a very direct and ­almost inexpressibly painful relationship with her subject matter. Although she is now, happily, the mother of two boys, Harris suffered a series of four miscarriages.

The first pregnancy loss came, she tells me, when she was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford-upon-Avon. “I was away from home, which was pretty horrible, given what was happening to me.

“I phoned my now ex-husband to come down and pick me up. I had a day in this B&B, feeling like it was the end of the world. I was really alone.”

Four years later, Harris, now a mother, found herself, once again, working at the RSC, directing her own play Midwinter. “Just by chance, the house they put us up in was opposite the bed and breakfast I’d been in when I had the miscarriage,” she remembers.

“Every day I used to look at the window of the room where I had been so deeply unhappy. Now I had a baby and toddler, and I just wished that I could reach across time and space to that woman who had been so low in that room.”

It was from this thought that Harris imagined the time-bending premise for A Glimpse. The writer has long enjoyed the metaphysical possibilities of ­dramatic writing; her play How to Hold Your Breath features the Devil himself, whilst her stage drama The Wheel has a protagonist who travels through the history of human conflict.

The notion of the character of Kate discovering a “portal” through which to communicate with her younger, disconsolate self is typical of Harris’s imaginative virtuosity. In this case, it springs from the desperate isolation she remembers feeling in the aftermath of her first miscarriage.

“It’s a very private experience,” she says. “Early pregnancy losses aren’t visible to the world. A lot of people won’t have known you were pregnant. You are alone in this. It’s a very, very lonely experience.

“My work is very much through the ­female gaze,” she continues. “I wanted to make the kind of work that is not often shown on screen.

“It’s often seen as a ‘women’s issue’ that doesn’t affect everyone, because not all women experience it.

“Even the word ‘miscarriage’ implies failure. Something has gone wrong, you have miscarried. How you internalise that is quite difficult.”

THAT difficulty comes, the director remembers, not only from the almost indescribable sense of loss, but also from the lack of access to the necessary support. In her case, that included health professionals who seemed incapable of responding with the necessary empathy.

“It might be better now, in terms of how it’s dealt with medically,” Harris says, “but I found that there was very ­little understanding of what the ­emotional impact might be. It was very much, ‘never mind, that’s done, try again’, and off you go.

“Actually, it certainly wasn’t that easy for me. For a lot of women, once you’ve had the positive pregnancy test, you’re on a journey to motherhood. When that gets interrupted, it’s extremely difficult.”

For the director, it is crucial that the film addresses pregnancy loss directly and openly. After all, it is a heartbreakingly painful event that is experienced by so many women, yet is often neglected by our culture.

However, in addition to the centrality to the film of this often terribly isolated female experience, Harris wanted to consider the impact of pregnancy loss on a couple. “Obviously I wanted to talk about the woman’s experience of having a ­miscarriage, but also what it’s like for a couple,” she says.

“It’s often quite a hard thing for a ­couple. The man can feel very removed from the experience.

“My experience, in my relationship, was that it was the first time we weren’t having the same response to something we were both experiencing. My grief was more profound. My now ex-partner, John, was disappointed and sad, but not ­completely floored by it.”

Given the movie’s treatment of so many aspects of the grief of pregnancy loss, the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival is, Harris suggests, the natural home for A Glimpse. “It feels like it’s a fitting place. It is very much about how you get through something that’s really tough.”

Deeply personal though the inspiration for her film is, and although it is focused upon a very specific physical and emotional trauma, the director thinks the movie also contains a universal ­metaphor. As we begin to take our first, tentative steps out of Covid restrictions, and as theatre artists like herself hope ­fervently that playhouses can reopen sooner, rather than later, Harris thinks that the “idea of a future ghost cheering you on is a good one.”

That notion translates well, she thinks, for the myriad challenges to our mental health that have arisen during the public health crisis. “I think we have to talk about what our experiences have been,” she says.

“People have had very different experiences of lockdown. That phrase, ‘we’re all in the same storm, but we’re in different boats’, is very apt.

“Some people have really struggled. The mental health consequences of the pandemic is something we’ll only really know further down the track.”

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As audiences begin accessing Harris’s film from tomorrow, they might reflect on the fact that, had the pandemic hit a little earlier, it might never have been made at all. A Glimpse was filmed in ­February 2020, just before Covid broke out in the UK.

“We slipped in under the wire,” says the director. “We were filming it in a flat. We were all absolutely packed together.

“There were no cases in the UK at the point. It was just this rumbling thing in the background.”

She is extremely relieved that filming was completed before Covid hit. However, much of the editing of her short movie was done under pandemic restrictions.

This was “tricky”, she says, as it involved a lot of “going back and forth” that wouldn’t have been required if the production team had all been able to work together in an editing suite. The work came to a successful fruition, thanks to the support of producer John McKay and colleagues, but Harris’s debut as a screen director has been “a steep learning curve.”

THE process of filming was rendered as pleasurable as it was stressful, the director explains, by the fact that she was able to secure her intended actor for the central role of Kate. “Thank God I was working with Kirsty Stuart,” she comments.

Harris had, she explains, written the piece with Stuart in mind. The pair had worked together on theatre productions, such as Harris’s adaptation of John Webster’s bloody tragedy The Duchess of Malfi and This Restless House, Harris’s version of the great trilogy The Oresteia, by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Add to that, the director says, the fact that Stuart is also as “brilliant on screen” as she is on stage.

Harris directed Stuart in her restaging of the Webster play, so she knew not only how good an actor Stuart is, but also that the two of them would work well together on the film. “It’s a very personal story,” she says, “I wanted to go into it already having a kind of professional shorthand with the actor.”

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The outcome of all this intensive work is a short film of which Harris expresses herself “proud”. I sense that, having made her debut behind the camera, she has the film bug.

She agrees emphatically. If she needed any further encouragement, A Glimpse has picked up the Best Short Drama prize from the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

Now, Harris and producer McKay, who runs his own film company ­Compact ­Pictures, are awaiting the outcome of a funding application to make a feature-length movie. Does this mean that Scottish theatre is about to lose one of its most talented writers and directors?

“Theatre is still my first love,” she reassures me. However, she is looking forward to getting back behind the camera.

Ahead of making A Glimpse, Harris benefited from the mentoring and development programme run by BBC Scotland’s soap opera River City. Having learnt the directorial ropes on the set of the popular show, she was raring to go on her own short film.

“Of course, doing my film and doing a soap are completely different things,” she acknowledges. “But at least I’d got my eye in with how to set up a shot, and how to run the floor; because it’s completely ­different from theatre.”

Harris and I have known each other for many years. At first it was in that uncertain relationship between playwright and theatre critic.

In more recent times we’ve got to know each other better. In 2015 I conducted a long interview with her for my PhD, which subsequently became my book on modern Scottish theatre.

I have a great ­admiration for her work as a stage ­writer and director, and for the fact that her calm and gentle manner hides a constant, artistic dynamism. The Harris mind, it seems to me, rarely switches off.

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“The creative life is a sort of madness,” she admits. “What happens with me is that I get an idea for something, then I’m not really completely satisfied, and I can’t rest until I’ve written it.

“There’s a little bit of obsession about it,” she admits. Although, in truth, she seems entirely content in her particular compulsion.

“I have an idea for something at the moment. I can’t quite work out the right form for it, but I know that a good chunk of my brain is thinking about it all the time.”

Given the many memorable art works that have emanated from Zinnie Harris’s fecund mind, we should be pleased that she continues to be so prolific. Tomorrow, however, will be a day to pause, sit back and await the response to her debut as a film director.

A Glimpse will be streamed in the ‘Grief’ section of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival film programme from tomorrow until May 23: mhfestival.com