Table of Contents

Introduction
Play

Promotional Information

A brutal fable set in a timeless spartan rural community, Knives In Hens is published in this edition with a new introduction by Mark Fisher.

About the Author

David Harrower is a Scottish playwright, based in Glasgow. His first play, Knives in Hens, was premiered at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1995. Subsequent plays include Kill the Old Torture Their Young, Presence, Dark Earth, Blackbird, and 365. Harrower has also written adaptations including The Chrysalids, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ivanov, and Woyzeck. Translations include The Girl on the Sofa, a translation of the Jon Fosse play as well as Schiller's Romantic tragedy Mary Stuart.

Reviews

An outstanding . . . play, David Harrower's Knives in Hens is set in a God-fearing, pre-industrial world and deals, passionately and intelligently with a woman's discovery of a language that corresponds with her feelings . . . A remarkable debut.
*Guardian*

David Harrower's remarkable debut as a professional dramatist creates a haunting, poetic and entirely individual world of its own. I have never seen a play quite like it. . . You leave the theatre in no doubt that you have watched one of the year's most heartening and accomplished debuts. Harrower already seems like a writer built to last.
*Daily Telegraph*

David Harrower's brittle, beautiful play Knives in Hens [...] is widely regarded as a masterpiece, and justifiably so. Its unvarnished language is at once coarse and moving.
*List*

[A]bsolutely unique, sparsely poetic and deeply affecting. Its care with language (which is a central concern for the young women) is reminiscent of the assiduous selecting (and removing) of words in the work of Harold Pinter . . . [O]ne of the greatest plays in the Scottish theatrical canon
*Sunday Herald*