Knives in Hens
Theatre director Yaël Farber had “a lousy start to the summer”, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. After years of critical acclaim, her version of Salome at the National Theatre “crashed and burned, dragged under by a hideously portentous” script penned by Farber herself. So it is great to see her back on top form with this “hypnotically powerful account” of David Harrower’s “extraordinary” play, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Knives in Hens, an opaque three-hander set in a preindustrial agrarian community, tells the story of an unnamed young woman who finds liberation through learning to read. It is “both the tense tale of an eternal triangle that leads to lust and murder, and a dream-play, touched with poetic mysteries” – and its “mythic resonances” are brilliantly served by the “raw, elemental quality” of the production.
It’s an “atmospheric, powerful” piece, and the story is “compelling”, said Sarah Crompton on Whatsonstage.com. I just wish I could enjoy it as much as I admire it. Yes, it all looks glorious, and there are “suitably intense” performances: Judith Roddy is “mesmeric” as the woman, as are Christian Cooke as her rough husband and Matt Ryan as the miller who introduces her to the written word. But Farber’s “darkly emotional” direction – plus the insistent music and soundscape – makes everything feel “ponderous and slow”.
Painfully so, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. This is one of those infuriating plays you come out of feeling “you haven’t the foggiest what it was all about – not even the title”. Does that signify a work of startling genius? No – just one of “punishing” tedium. It has everything needed to put you off the theatre: “heavy symbolism, no story; immense self-importance” and funereal pacing. I left baffled that this “humourless little work should ever have been regarded as a modern classic”. You’d have a better time “sitting in a hearse, in a Welsh slate quarry, in November, in the rain, listening to Ingmar Bergman reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam.”