The Scent of Roses

You'd be surprised how a simple thing like locking up your husband in the same room as you, makes you aware of something. Of being alive. The Scent of Roses begins with a wife who takes her husband hostage in order to have an honest conversation. This simple, transgressive act, and her demand for a straight answer, sparks a chain of conversations, interrogations, obfuscations and revelations, as they and those around them try to discover what is real and who they can trust in a post-truth world. Zinnie Harris's The Scent of Roses premieres at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in February 2022.

Zinnie Harris's plays include the multi-award-winning Further than the Furthest Thing (National Theatre/Tron Theatre; winner of the 1999 Peggy Ramsay Award, 2001 John Whiting Award, Edinburgh Fringe First Award), How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court Theatre; joint winner of the Berwin Lee Award), The Wheel (National Theatre of Scotland; joint winner of the 2011 Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award), Nightingale and Chase (Royal Court Theatre), Midwinter, Solstice (both RSC), Fall (Traverse Theatre/RSC), By Many Wounds (Hampstead Theatre), the trilogy This Restless House (Citizens Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland), based on Aeschylus' Oresteia and Meet Me at Dawn (Traverse Theatre). Also, Ibsen's A Doll's House for the Donmar Warehouse, Strindberg's Miss Julie for the National Theatre of Scotland and Webster's The Duchess (of Malfi) (Royal Lyceum Theatre). Zinnie received an Arts Foundation Fellowship for playwriting, and was Writer in Residence at the RSC, 2000-2001. She is Professor of Playwriting and Screenwriting at St Andrews University, and is the Associate Director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.