Knives in Hens

by David Harrower

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 24 August 2017

Yaël Farber directs Judith Roddy as the Young Woman, Christian Cooke as Pony William (her husband) and Matt Ryan as Gilbert Horn (the miller) in this revival of David Harrower's 1995 play, designed by Soutra Gilmour and lit by Tim Lutkin. 

Yaël Farber likes to create an atmosphere even before a performance starts; the auditorium is dim, with 'smoke' drifting through the directional spots on stage, and a gradually increasing low hum pervading the space. There is packed earth on the stage floor, black walls behind, and a gigantic circular disk just visible in the gloom, which turns out to be an enormous mill wheel set upright rather than lying flat to the ground.

The play opens with frantic but inarticulate lovemaking between the husband and wife, but almost immediately their subsequent conversation raises issues about the uses and force of language. He says, 'You're like a field' but she is apparently incapable of comprehending a metaphor: 'How'm I a field?'. Though the man appears to have the edge in sophistication here, it is a minimal advantage in a world of unremitting physical toil as they struggle to maintain their existence on a small farm. But when she is on her own, she struggles with language, trying to articulate her response to the natural world she sees.

The couple, like others in the village, hate the miller and yet they are utterly reliant on him to grind their wheat into flour. They stoke their hatred to offset their reluctance to put themselves into his power, for they see relinquishing their hard-won crops into his control even for the time it takes to grind them as a dangerous even if inevitable act. The miller's solitariness after the death of his wife and child only adds fuel to the village rumour-mongering about his possibly demonic power: we are in a place where anyone distinctive is immediately suspect.

The miller can write; the woman, sent alone by her husband with their bags of wheat, sees him do so, and though fearful, proves to him that she can form letters too. However she sees an inkstain on her hands as evidence that he has bewitched her, or perhaps both her and her husband - she knows at any rate that it would be a disaster if her husband saw her stained hand. 

What is happening here? These simple, almost elemental plot points, showing a deeply conservative and ignorant community struggling to contain the threat of difference, and to live under God's oversight, create huge resonances and reveal profound shifts in the relations between the three characters. Is Pony William, the ploughman, really only obsessed with his horses (hence his nickname) or is he 'ploughing' others apart from his wife? Is the miller really a threat or is he just a bereaved and lonely man? Is the woman a victim or can she live on her own terms?

In this production, everything almost mythic or archetypal. The clothing is not medieval, though the mentality clearly is, or that is how we would prefer to identify it, as it would be too threatening to admit that it might be contemporary (the playwright originally envisaged a 'pre-industrial' society). The language, stripped back to basics, is nevertheless full of powerful allusions and unspoken tension, threat, desire and lust, and is at times richly poetic. The characters interact, but there are no easy alignments and the woman is alone with her new confidence in words at the end. It's extremely effective, a rich and challenging experience.