How to Hold Your Breath

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Echoes of Blasted … Maxine Peake (Dana) and Michael Shaeffer (Jarron) in How to Hold Your Breath at the Royal Court. Along the way Dana is guided by a mysterious character known as the Librarian (Peter Forbes), who supplies her with a series of ‘how to’ books.

Zinnie Harris | National Theatre of Scotland Zinnie Harris | National Theatre of Scotland

The production was directed by the Turkish theatre director Murat Daltaban, and went on to win a host of awards at the CATS (Best Production, Best Director, Best Sound and Best Actor). Peake is in androgynous kit (very bad getting-on-for-jodhpur trousers) and sports the David Bowie crop she had as Hamlet. 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. Artistic director Vicky Featherstone adeptly unpacks the themes of the play, with eloquent staging and powerful visual reminders to emphasise the horror of the character's changing world, a world which literally shakes and disappears underneath their feet. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Maxine Peake (Dana) and Michael Shaeffer (Jarron) in How To Hold Your Breath by Zinnie Harris at the Royal Court.Harris is a good postmodernist voice in contemporary theatre, but it sometimes feels a little too off-the wall - and from what I've seen of the play performed - it definitely reads better than it performs. This representation has even extended behind the curtain, with the Johannesburg production of Meet Me at Dawn being supported by an all-women design and production team. If none of it is really happening, the geopolitical stuff loses value, as does Jasmin, whose heartbreaking, ugly late monologue about her baby is one of the play’s stand-out moments.

REVIEW: How To Hold Your Breath, Royal Court Theatre

The pair have teamed up again with a comparably weighty play, How to Hold Your Breath, to the Jerwood downstairs at the Royal Court. The play is propelled with momentum and urgency -- as if the people so often forced to hold their breath and keep quiet were finally allowed to speak out with a veritable roar.

He has been on the theatre judging panel for London’s Olivier Awards and has a masters degree in English literature, specialising in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Harris’ original play, The Scent of Roses, had its world premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in 2022, [22] followed by a revival of Further than the Furthest Thing at the Young Vic in London the following year. Her 2000 play Further than the Furthest Thing won the Peggy Ramsay Foundation Award, a Fringe First, and the John Whiting Award.

Zinnie Harris: Plays 1: Further than the Furthest Thing Zinnie Harris: Plays 1: Further than the Furthest Thing

It is an unsettling experience, leaving you hoping for your own librarian with a “how to” book outside the theatre. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. On top of this, a librarian pops up in increasingly unlikely situations, offering “how to” self-help books to guide Dana through her various challenges.

Since she started at the Royal Court, her credits have included Dennis Kelly’s The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas and Abi Morgan’s The Mistress Contract.