Unearthing a lyrical, thrilling Nineties classic
Knives in Hens Donmar Warehouse
David Harrower’s Knives in Hens was probably the most astonishing playwriting debut of the Nineties. In a decade that saw an explosion of talent, the competition could hardly have been fiercer: Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Martin Mcdonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Harrower’s three-hander (first staged in 1995 at Edinburgh’s Traverse) bore passing comparison with all of them.
Its remote, pre-industrial setting felt like a thunderclap of imaginative daring. Its dialogue was like nothing we had heard before.
Yael Farber, the feted South African director, redeeming herself after her overblown and underwhelming Salome at the National this summer, confirms the play’s status as a modern classic with a revival that doesn’t slacken its grip for an exquisitely lit 90 minutes.
At first, I worried that Farber’s
tendency to maximise visceral atmosphere would come at the expense of the poetic delicacy. Her establishing vignette involves Christian Cooke’s horny-handed ploughman, “Pony Williams”, setting his unnamed spouse (Judith Roddy) aside from her poultryplucking duties and savagely thrusting into her atop dirt-covered cobbles; conjugal intimacy as domestic rape.
So watertight is the writing, though, that its profundity and mystery remain intact. In the most eloquent scene, Roddy’s impassive village lass (who has been offered emancipation by Matt Ryan’s brooding and learned local miller) sits by candlelight and reads aloud, as if in a dream: “All I must do is push names into what is there the same as when I push my knife into the stomach of a hen.” There’s no going back for her; there wasn’t for Harrower. More than 20 years on, the double thrill of seeing a woman finding her inner self and a playwright discovering his voice leaves me elated all over again.