DAVID Harrower's debut, revived for the first time on the mainstage for the Fringe, is a remarkable play. There are plays that create their own world, but this one seems to create it's own psychology as well. It is disturbingly familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Set in a primitive, yet somehow contemporary rural landscape, Knives in Hens is about a ploughman, his wife and a miller whose relationships are as rugged as the land they inhabit. Everything about the play is stripped back to its crude, elemental state, the very language rarely deviating from subject-verb-object simplicity.
Philip Howard's production, with tough, dour performances from Liam Brennan, Lewis Howden and Pauline Knowles, is equally austere, bolstering this unsettling, even scary, vision of a people so afraid of the unknown that even simile is treated with suspicion.
It's weird and puzzling, and will return to haunt you.
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