Knives in Hens

Rating:
Summary: Magically lyrical.
Review: Harrower deftly enables the stage to transform into a moving poem. This is a not only a beautiful play but a stunning piece of literature. A recommended read for anyone who appreciates a finely crafted play.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful play about a Scottish woman's moral awakening.
Review: Scottish dramatist David Harrower's KNIVES IN HENS is an eerie and startling play that explores with conviction and an almost off-hand surrealism the connection between language and the world one inhabits through it.

Focusing on a trio of characters in a God-fearing rural community, Harrower paints a stark and coarsely poetic portrait of what happens when one begins to question the very ground on which one walks. Specifically, Harrower centers his attention on a character simply named Young Woman, whose naive sense of the world and her own impulses is eroded throughout the progression of the play, as she discovers the power of language. her own sexuality and the strength of her imagination.

A blindly devoted wife living in a private linguistic and metaphorical world informed by a sheltered upbringing in a pre-industrial village in an unidentified country (although the rhythms of rural Scottish speech color the text), Young Woman ventures outside her field one day to! have her grain milled by a local hated figure of the Miller Gilbert Horn while her husband Pony William tends to a pregnant horse.

Young Woman's encounter with Gilbert Horn serves as the catalyst for her awakening. He provokes her and stirs in her a desire to give expression to her thoughts through the act of writing them down, something she fears to do because she believes writing is sinful. To write, she believes, is to defy God, since God is the one who gives an individual her thoughts and to claim such thoughts as one's own, to voice them, is blasphemy.

As the Young Woman's relationship with her husband becomes more and more strained, Gilbert Horn begins to enter her sexual dreams until she feels she must act upon them. Although it may seem beyond cliche at this point to once again have a woman discover the power of her sexuality, of her body, through a man, Harrower manages to make the Young Woman's transformation seem novel and surprising.

By bringing in an elemen! t of the supernatural, Harrower removes the play from its s! ecular framework and places it in a curiously pagan, ritualized world where Gilbert Horb can indeed be a ghost and sorceror as well as a miller straight out of Eliot's MILL ON THE FLOSS.

A bleak, abrupt soundscape of words hurled, then barely uttered for fear of what they would do, KNIVES IN HENS is a powerful play built on a fragile, but elegant collage of 24 scenes that examine the disjunctive relationship between language and identity, creation and authorship, and the manner in which inexpressible feelings can sometimes conjure a reality more profoundly disturbing than the quotidian world will allow.