Poultry play

KNIVES IN HENS,Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin Previews Fri-Sat, Nov 9-28 8pm €23-€28 01-8819613/14

In 1995, David Harrower’s debut play caused a sensation in Edinburgh.

Knives in Hens

won awards throughout Europe has been translated into dozens of languages. The play, a striking and heady three-hander, seems an unlikely candidate for catchfire success.

Written in a starkly poetic language, it features a love triangle within a community that is either pre-industrial or post-apocalyptic, Christian or pagan. A young woman hemmed in by language (played by Catherine Walker), who has recently married an adulterous ploughman (Vincent Regan), discovers self-awareness and literacy through the despised miller (Lorcan Cranitch, pictured above with Walker).

Ultimately, Knives in Hensis about articulation, abstraction, naming, self-definition and the violence they bring. "All I must do is push names into what is there," realises the woman, "the same as when I push my knife into the stomach of a hen". The upheaval that follows is pregnant with meaning, and a production must accommodate both its cerebral and visceral effect.

Landmark Productions has assembled an impressive cast under the direction of Alan Gilsenan; not quite counting their chickens yet, but definitely knowing how to skewer them.

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