War Baby; for Zinnie Harris, Having a Baby Brought Home the Reality of War with Alarming Intensity. The Result Was a Soul-Searching Play

Summary

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Becoming a parent is a pretty frightening business at the best of times. When war is in the air - as it almost always is - that fear takes on a whole new dimension. Two years ago, when Zinnie Harris began work in earnest on her new play Midwinter, her first son was seven months old.

"I was just beginning to think about working again," says the Edinburgh-based playwright and director. "That's quite an intense transition for women anyway. And then also we were just about to go to war with Iraq and there was Sars around and all kinds of terrorism It felt like the world had become an intensely dangerous place. And I found myself thinking, 'What have you done, bringing a child into the world?'"

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War Baby; for Zinnie Harris, Having a Baby Brought Home the Reality of War with Alarming Intensity. The Result Was a Soul-Searching Play

Yet Harris, now 31, was also brimming with the excitement of new parenthood, after years of being "quite desperate for children" and finding the subject too painful to contemplate. "You're so personally happy with your life and your baby, but actually two metres outside your door it's such shit," she says. "I had this feeling of needing to wrap the bubble closer to protect the baby...

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