Knives in Hens

Smock Alley, Dublin: What's in a name? That profoundly simple question occupied Adam, blithely identifying the animals of Eden; Shakespeare's Juliet, teasing out the absurdity of learned hatred; not to mention Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, building entire schools of thought from the enquiry.

It is also the driving question of David Harrower’s stimulating and earthy 1995 play, deftly realised in Landmark’s new production as a cerebral and austerely beautiful fable. Religion, control, freedom and the life of the mind are all part of the answer.

In the wrong hands this would resemble a tutorial in structuralism, but Harrower's debut play poses the question with subtlety, his unadorned language rolling like a terse poetry. Set in a pre-industrial community – where Pony William (Vincent Regan) tends the land with horse and plough, the loathed miller (Lorcan Cranitch) grinds grain with a stone wheel, and the village's economy is based primarily on flour, fear and hatred – Knives in Hensseems to be set somewhere between purgatory and paradise. Innocence and hard work go hand in hand, God is unquestioned and all-knowing, and as Catherine Walker's young wife realises her husband's infidelities, it is unclear whether The Fall has yet happened or is scheduled for sometime soon.

“His world is there, in front of my eyes,” reasons Catherine Walker of God’s creation and the dawning power of her words. “All I must do is push names into what is there, the same as when I push my knife into the stomach of a hen.” Walker uses that near-perfect blend of restless reason and violent assertion to create a discreetly physical performance. Not quite the doughty shouter the playwright envisages, Walker instead deflates her elegance into the loose poise of a curious child, shifting towards to the self-possession of an enquirer, a discoverer, an avenger. If ignorance is bliss and knowledge is power, hers is the quietest revolution: a struggle to open her eyes.

Appropriately sparing in his treatment, director Alan Gilsenan is nonetheless inclined to underscore a religious context, where the audience line the space on hard church pews beneath a large crucifix. Such is the play’s drift of symbol and meaning that it is tempting to try to nail some of it down but Joe Vanêk’s design strives for something between suggestion and explication. Barns and mills may be rudely indicated, but more lyrical set pieces, accentuated by the beautifully unreal twists of Sinéad Wallace’s lighting, grant the performance the contours of a dream.

Like any dream, the play resists easy explanation, and – gratifyingly – no production of Knives in Hensshould ever be definitive. Landmark's production makes more than a stab at it, though. Its slow burning, potent depiction of intellectual awakening pushes meaningfully into the world before our eyes; its figures linger in our imaginations, striding towards their own definitions.

Until Nov 28