Knives in Hens: the power of words and names
6 Oct 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

When a thing has a name, it has a use.

You don't have to be a thing to be like it.

Like red hearts tied in cow saliva.

Knives in Hens is about words. Words as weapons, as explanations, as confusion. Diana Bentley (Category E) is a young woman who struggles throughout the play to give things their proper names, to make sense out of chaos by getting descriptions exact. That her older husband, Jim Mezon (Lear, Red) refers to her mostly in the third person, and her only identification seems to be as his wife, doesn't simplify matters.

Nor does it help that, despite her enthusiastic sexual appetite, the husband seems to have a propensity for having his "cock licked" by other young women. And possibly his beloved horses (Knives in Hens is ambiguous, as it is about many things, about the level of bestiality committed). Nor does it help that she is deeply religious, in an ambiguously evangelical way. The parallel to the bible as law and God's naming of things being definitive, is non-ambiguous.

Nor does it help that the miller, Jonathan Young, who her husband and the village have pumped her up to hate, turns out to be sexually attractive. Not just because of his looks, potency and smooth tongue, or because he has a shelf of books that are suggestive in demeanour, "Standing up like that. Touching. It don't look right." But also because he writes his thoughts down and encourages her to do the same. "Better than any bed, that soft paper."

There are a lot of heavy-handed metaphors - a mythical field at the edge of the world, the strength of trees, the difficult delivery of a foal representing the birth of individual consciousness - in Knives in Hens, but there are also astonishingly lyrical passages when the miller explains the joys and power of writing and of words. When the young woman picks up a pen and begins to write, it is very moving. Almost as moving as when she reads what she has written.

The text of Knives in Hens is so sparsely dense and deliberately obtuse - if playwright David Harrower can spend the time choosing each word, the audience can do some intense pondering about what it all means - that the cast wisely chooses to ride the words. Their rhythms are poetic and hypnotic with the few visual effects - the miller thunderclapping flour into fairy dust is as effective as the love triangle's inevitable stylized sex, violence and death - punctuating effectively. That the trio are required to frequently pause or gesture meaningfully, or to hit a mark, underscores how hard they are working to bring the text to life.

Many of the words resonate and Knives in Hens is echoing in my head as I type, partly trying to figure out what I have just experienced, partly because I am aware of how hard it is to find the words to express that. Which is much like the difficulty the young woman has in naming things. Or finding her own name. Or even claiming the right to have her own name. To break free of her assertion that, "the glory of God is God, not his creations." Even though God has a name, Knives in Hens& proves that those words are not true.