Knives in Hens; Kill the Old Torture Their Young; Presence; Dark Earth; Blackbird
Along with David Greig and Gregory Burke, David Harrower is one of the most successful of the new Scottish playwrights to emerge in the mid-1990s. In an article surveying tendencies in contemporary Scottish theatre, Jean-Pierre Simard considers the ‘triple prism’ of dominant elements that characterise Scottish theatre today: the popular, the political and the poetic.1 Certainly these tendencies can be identified to varying degrees in Harrower’s plays, though perhaps the most prominent is the poetic impulse in his best work.
Born in 1966 in Edinburgh, Harrower’s career started with the Traverse Theatre’s production of Knives in Hens in 1995. The play captured the imaginations of audiences, directors and critics around the world, and has become, according to the National Library of Scotland, ‘one of the most performed Scottish plays of all time’.2 It has been widely translated and continues to be performed across Europe, America and Australia. In particular, the German premiere of the play, directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Baracke am Deutschen Theater Berlin in 1997, won the Theater Heute Best Foreign Play (Critics’ Award) and was pivotal in presenting Harrower’s work to European audiences. Since then Harrower has produced a number of plays, though little to equal the stunning achievement of his debut work:Kill the Old Torture Their Young (Traverse, 1998), Presence (Royal Court, 2001), Dark Earth (Traverse, 2003) and Blackbird (Edinburgh Festival, 2005). His most recent pieces include 365 (NTS, 2008) and Lucky Box (Paines Plough, 2009). Among these, only Blackbird has won critical acclaim in any way comparable to Knives in Hens. Arguably Blackbird’s success lies in its fusion of the other two elements highlighted by Simard – the popular and the political. The play opened at the Edinburgh Festival in veteran German director Peter Stein’s production and then transferred to the West End. Winner of the 2006 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland Best New Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2007, Blackbird has placed Harrower back in the critical limelight. A steady stream of productions has since taken place in Europe and beyond.
Besides his own work, Harrower has also been responsible for numerous adaptations. He has expressed a fascination with antecedent playwrights and their formal choices, asking, ‘Why they’ve written the plays they’ve written and what it was in response to’.3 His adaptations include Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (2001), Büchner’s Woyzeck (2001), Chekhov’s Ivanov (2002), Fosse’s The Girl on the Sofa (2002) and Purple (2003), Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods (2003), Schiller’s Mary Stuart (2006), Brecht’s The Good Soul of Szechuan (2008) and Schnitzler’s Sweet Nothings (2009). This dimension of Harrower’s creative output is a significant aspect of his contribution to the contemporary theatre environment in Britain and Scotland.
Knives in Hens opened at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh on 2 June 1995. The work is a non-naturalistic, semantically open, three-hander that revolves around themes of language, literacy and agency. Set in an indeterminate pre-industrial rural space, Harrower describes the play – along with Dark Earth – as an ‘investigation of [his] thoughts and feelings about Scotland’.4 Yet in fact there is little to mark this work (in contrast to Dark Earth) as regionally specific, and undoubtedly this has been a contributing factor in its popularity across cultures and languages. What is remarkable about Knives in Hens is the powerful sense of linguistic choreography, compositional precision and poetic nuance. A recapitulation of the play’s plot does little to communicate its effect, though Alison Croggon’s description of the play as a fable is apt.5 As Mark Fisher remarked in a review of the 2005 revival,
It seems to hit you on a subconscious level, as if by stripping back the language and the setting to its most austere, the playwright has tapped into a source of elemental power. Like a dream, Knives in Hens is a play you feel. Articulation comes later and is never adequate.6
Nevertheless, the poetic qualities of the play text reward scrutiny, in particular the modalities of the literal and the figurative that frame its concerns.
Knives in Hens follows the gradual transformation of its central character, known only as Young Woman, as she moves from a state of brute existence to a self-aware and literate relation to her world. The other characters – Pony William, the ploughman who becomes her husband, and Gilbert Horn, the miller who becomes her lover – introduce her to experiences and knowledge that alter her identity. The play begins with the Young Woman interrogating and bluntly rejecting William’s use of metaphorical language:
Young Woman I’m not a field. How’m I a field? What’s a field? Wet. Black with rain. I’m no field. […]
William Said you’re like a field.
Young Woman Said I’m a field sitting here.
William Said you’re like a field. Like a field.
Young Woman’S the same.
William Nothing close, woman.
Young Woman If I’m like a field must be a field.
William (laughs) Don’t have to be a thing to be like it. (p. 1)
While the scene serves to sketch the characters’ relative sensibilities, it also unfolds a self-conscious metatheatrical set of possibilities concerning the power of words to create worlds. Despite the simplicity of the words here and their repetition, a multi-faceted linguistic negotiation is underway that underwrites the drama as a whole. Metaphorical relations are conventionally understood as a means of extending and transforming meaning. Here that process, so habitually taken for granted, is contested and thus spotlighted. First the Young Woman takes William’s statement literally; notably his original statement is absent so he is forced to reiterate. She repeats what she hears, but her paraphrase renders the analogy a complex metaphor – stripped of the word ‘like’ which must then be explicitly reintroduced by William. William’s simile is a much simpler form of comparison and has several obvious possible figurative meanings – woman as property, woman as fertile earth to be tended and planted by man, woman as a force of nature – though he fails to elucidate any of these. Implicit here and as the play progresses is not merely the power involved in naming, but the radical nature of metaphor that comprises analogy, but also violent collision of ideas, images and symbols.7
In the opening scene William exerts authority over the Young Woman through his superior command of language; nevertheless the lesson conveyed in the final line of the above quotation marks the Young Woman’s initiation into a new level of verbal competence that complements her innate curiosity and strength of will. By the third scene William has made the Young Woman his wife, and despite his earlier eloquence, her practical functions as worker and as sexual object are clearly now what he most values. The woman’s mouth is for eating, for sexually pleasuring her husband, not for naming the world around her. William discourages her from dangerous abstract thought and in a reversal of the dynamic of the first scene directs her towards the literal when he asks her to list her morning’s activities.
Obliged to take their grain to the miller when William attends his horses, the Young Woman’s encounter with Gilbert Horn is a rite of passage that endows her with a new sense of identity. The miller is demonised by the ignorant villagers as a parasite and sorcerer. Though initially paralysed by terror and hatred of the unknown embodied by Gilbert, the Young Woman’s dialogues with him slowly extend her comprehension of the power of language to shape reality. During her second visit to the mill, Gilbert’s literacy becomes the focus of the Young Woman’s fear, when he reveals to her his record book in which he writes daily events and his thoughts. Writing is for the woman an unnatural act that controverts the natural process of forgetting: ‘’S God puts things in your head and’s him who takes them away. ’S sin to keep them’ (p. 18). Here the clash of epistemologies on the cusp of the transition from a pre-literate to a literate world is subtly articulated. Gilbert challenges the woman to overcome her dread and use the skills she learned in school. A seminal moment in the play occurs when, with considerable effort, she defiantly writes her name. At this point she assumes an agency she has heretofore lacked; she names herself, and is no longer merely the wife of Pony William. Significantly though, her name is not revealed in the exchange between characters, Gilbert merely remarks: ‘Tell you what, horse-wife. You’re beautifully named’ (p. 21).
The Young Woman’s engagement with the literate world via the miller initially does not displace the superstitious conviction that he has cast a spell on her and the conflict between irrational and rational rages in her statements. Yet, as a result of this collision of worldviews, the Young Woman arrives at an uneasy enlightenment – an understanding of William’s unfaithfulness is revealed by Gilbert, and some sense of her own power, as expressed in writing:
This is me. I live now. […] Every thing I see and know is put in my head by God. […] His world is there, in front of my eyes. 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. This is how I know God is there. (p. 26)
But most strikingly the woman’s appropriation of the power of the written word, of naming, is analogous to a violent gesture. Something is killed as a result of this type of knowledge and a new reality is created. Superstition and a belief in evil magic give way to a more rational understanding of betrayal and a desire for revenge.
Following the community ceremony of rolling the miller’s new millstone to the mill, William, Gilbert and the Young Woman finally share the stage space. His wife apparently unconscious as a result of exhaustion and alcohol, William discusses his attitude to her with the miller. Again the metaphors he uses are agricultural. The Young Woman and the Miller join forces, killing William with the old millstone before consummating their relationship. The Young Woman then resolves to perform the role of ‘broken-hearted wife’ (p. 38) in the community and Gilbert leaves the village. The twinning of the capacity for deceit with the acquisition of knowledge inevitably suggests the Fall of Man, an allusion that concludes the play with a resonant sense of ambivalence.
Harrower’s second play could hardly have provided a greater contrast to the poetic impetus of Knives in Hens. Kill the Old Torture Their Young premiered on 12 July 1998 at the Traverse. Contemporary in focus, the play is set in an unnamed northern city in the UK that perhaps resembles Glasgow. Social alienation, urban isolation, postmodern identity and a crisis of belonging are its principal thematic strands. Composed of short scenes set in different nondescript urban locations, the play revolves around several small clusters of characters whose paths cross but whose lives fail to connect. The structure is a familiar device in narratives with some postmodern import, as is evidenced, for example, by David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message which premiered the following year. Harrower’s title derives from a song by Scottish grunge band Biffy Clyro and although it seems laden with in-yer-face promise, little by way of the expected provocation is delivered. Michael Raab describes the play as a ‘diffuse city panorama’ and ventures that the title was perhaps its best feature.8
A collage of interlocking and juxtaposed fragments is linked directly and indirectly to the return of a film-maker to his hometown after ten years. Robert Malloch has been successful in London and he wants to film a documentary about the city of his childhood. Each of the play’s characters embodies forms of isolation, marginalisation and lack of belonging that bear tangentially on the film project. Darren, a young man who wants to be an actor but works at menial service sector jobs, manifests wildly disjointed moods oscillating between menace and extreme neediness. Heather, a receptionist at a television company, is a routine-bound office drone whose initiative does not extend beyond manipulating those weaker in her workplace and maintaining a strict after-work programme of badminton on Tuesdays, aerobics on Wednesdays, cinema on Thursdays and so on. It is not a little ironic that Malloch adopts her as his muse for the ill-fated documentary. Steven, Heather’s boss, is a lonely divorcee wracked with a sense of his own powerlessness and indirection for which he compensates by talking too much and meddling in others’ affairs. Angela, a failed artist, expresses her insecurity through an overly assertive desire to help others. Her elderly neighbour Paul callously rejects her efforts, preferring to live in isolation in his tenement flat with the fading memory of a time he spotted an eagle in the city. The rock star is a paper-thin cliché of the alienated traveller.
The city as a set of ‘non-places’, to use Marc Augé’s term, is certainly applicable here.9 And of interest is the guiding metaphor of the film-maker’s desire to produce a creative document that would make these spaces and his memories of them signify. Yet what is in evidence is the extent to which such a project is the product of chance, luck and chaos. As stressed by Malloch himself, ‘There’s always going to be things I’ll miss […] I have to accept that’ (p. 44). The failure of imagination and creativity that permeates the play provides an engaging concern, but its potential is only partially realised.
Harrower works the humour of his various scenarios with skill. Robert’s somewhat pompous speech about the gift of inspiration with the very uninspiring Heather is juxtaposed with the rock singer thrashing out a new song in the adjoining hotel room. In a similar vein, the most richly humorous scene in the play occurs when Steven, while looking for Robert and the camera crew, encounters a solitary birdwatcher on a patch of open ground. Although the birdwatcher is unequivocal about his desire to be left alone, Steven is painfully oblivious:
Birdwatcher Some people can tell by looking at me that because I’m sitting here on my own it means I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to be let alone. This is why I come bird-watching. It’s me and nobody else.
Steven I know exactly what you’re saying.
Birdwatcher Do you? Good.
Steven I should find something like this to do on my own. Something to take my mind off things. (p. 28)
Admittedly, the comedy of failed communication here is finely wrought, and Harrower reveals his talent for dramatic irony and contemporary idiom. Yet these qualities ultimately fail to equip the play’s investigation of postmodern ennui with complexity of plot or depth of character.
Presence opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 19 April 2001. The play is a dialogue-driven piece set in Hamburg in 1960, dramatising the formative moments of the Beatles. In an interview Harrower claimed that it was ‘his most well-crafted story yet – but to write it he has steeped his hands in some pretty murky waters’. His aim was to ‘write about the dynamics of the band’, and since the Beatles are such an important part of the fabric of British popular culture it is undoubtedly a subject that is an ‘intriguing’ one.10 The play falters in its ambitions, however, primarily due to the conservative lifelessness of the chosen form. The naturalistic dialogue and linear, mono-dimensional plot fail to energise the material.
The play outlines the arrival of the band in Hamburg, their experiences of living in squalor, playing in a club, attempting to seduce girls, and their interaction with Marian, the manager of the club. Marian’s attempts to keep the Liverpool lads out of trouble on the mean streets of Hamburg are met with disdain. Full of youthful bombast and led by the aggressively arrogant Paul, they disregard her efforts to guide them as to how to behave and how to perform. Pete, the only member of the group to speak a little German, develops a polite relationship with Marian and is increasingly distanced from the rest. The naïve George ineptly attempts to seduce a waitress, Elke, who is enthralled by American culture and wants to escape Germany. The group meanwhile develops an increasingly confrontational performance style incorporating jack boots and references to Hitler. Their historical ignorance and insensitivity are both stunning and unsympathetic. Pete’s superior attractiveness becomes a bone of contention when Marian, angry that they have disobeyed her, tells the group that he should be their front man. As a result of breaking curfew the under-age George is sent home and the others are forced to follow suit. The closing scene portrays Marian writing Pete Best on the ceiling with soot and setting fire to his stage jacket.
The play adheres rather methodically to a lesser-known aspect of the history of the Beatles’ inaugural experiences as a group struggling to establish themselves. The McCartney character is negatively portrayed and, peculiarly, Lennon never appears – indeed one review noted that ‘the Beatles sans Lennon inevitably suggests Hamlet without the prince’.11 Somewhat more interesting, for an English audience, is the flavour of German culture at the beginning of the 1960s as seen through the eyes of German women of different generations, though the usual Nazi skeletons in the closet get a routine rattle. The title points in a number of directions: stage presence, historical presence and, of course, the presence of original band members, like Best (the so-called Fifth Beatle). Generally, reviews of Presence were tepid, pointing to the limitations of its conventional form, plot and laddish repartee.
According to Danièle Berton-Charrière, in 2003 the Traverse Theatre invited several dramatists to write on the theme of Britishness.12Dark Earth, which premiered at the venue on 25 July, was Harrower’s response. As Ian Brown says, ‘Dark Country [sic] examines modern tensions between urban and rural, modern and atavistic in the shadow of the Antonine Wall.’13 A lengthy three-act piece, it is an uneven work that hobbles between unfulfilled menace and comedy. Glaswegians Euan and Valerie get stranded in the Lowlands near the Antonine Wall when their car breaks down. In one of the play’s moments of arch humour, the city dwellers pore over the map unable to locate themselves – ‘We’re on a fold, I think, if you can believe that’ says Euan (p. 7). They are indeed on a fold in an almost Deleuzian sense where subjectivity is accounted for not within the conventions of interiority and exteriority but as a topology of folds that collapses ‘a distinction between perceiver and perceived, virtual and actual, inside and outside’.14 Valerie and Euan find themselves in contact with a Scotland that is simultaneously uncannily familiar and alien.
The couple are assisted by Petey, Ida and their twenty-year-old daughter Christine, who have a small farm nearby. Petey and Ida are jovial, if idiosyncratic, Christine is prickly and caustic. The city dwellers find themselves victims of Ida’s hospitality and audience to Petey and Christine’s fascination with the Roman and Scottish history of the area. With friction already overt between Euan and Valerie, the couple find themselves further at odds in their reactions to their rural hosts. Valerie is content to accept their hospitality and to stay the night, Euan is ill at ease and wants to leave as soon as possible. As the evening wears on, and with neither a mechanic nor a taxi in sight, Euan and Valerie stay. Whisky is drunk, songs are sung, stories are told and the following morning Petey takes Valerie to see the Wall, while Euan is subjected to a full Scottish breakfast. However, antipathies erupt when it becomes evident that Petey and Ida have offered their accounts to Valerie for inspection and Christine reveals that the farm has already been sold since they are virtually bankrupt. Ida’s desire to reverse the sale and open a bed and breakfast causes Christine to storm out with plans to leave her parents to their fate. After some further confrontation, the Cauldwell family regroups and turn on Euan and Valerie. The play concludes with them hurling abuse at the ‘freeloaders’ and ‘thieves’ as Euan and Valerie drive off (pp. 107–8).
The resonances of the play’s title are gestured towards by a definition that prefaces the text. Dark Earth is ‘buried soil in archaeological excavation which often reflects prolonged periods of abandoned settlement; alternatively, deposits of silty soil reworked by earthworms to produce grassland’ (p. 6). Both pertain to the symbolic terrain of the drama. Euan and Valerie in their failed attempt to locate some site of archaeological significance, unwittingly unearth something in the heart of their own country, an existence they fail to comprehend. Petey, Ida and Christine’s obsession with the distant past is brought to the surface by the presence of the outsiders, and it is noteworthy that they treat that past as contiguous with the present. Thus Christine and Petey’s argument over the status of Bonnie Prince Charlie is not a matter of historical debate, but of present loyalties. While their rather romantic attachment to the layers of history surrounding them is endearing, perhaps even poetic, in a much harsher sense the Cauldwells are living in the past. A more prosaic concern emerges in the second act when Christine reveals that the farm as a business is no longer a viable entity and in the third act when squabbles over accounts, the costs of bed and breakfast and discrimination against farmers are introduced. Regardless of longevity of the family’s claim to their land, or of the fertility of their imaginations, the closing impression is of futility – the Cauldwells, buried in debt, are likely to become just another forgotten contour in the dark earth of the region. In concordance with this view Berton-Charrière reads the play as a political critique of forms of Scottish identity and the disintegration of the fiction of national unity into ‘a constellation of egocentric, individual elements’.15
Reception of the play was relatively polarised. As Michael Billington remarks in his review, it ‘eventually falls uneasily between economic parable and romantic myth’. He felt ‘that Harrower had led us up the mystic garden path only to return us to the world of material fact. One is left with a strong sense of two mutually uncomprehending cultures.’16Encore Theatre Magazine by contrast describes the play as ‘a tautly constructed thriller’ and although admitting the final twenty minutes are less successful, claims ‘the first act is one of the most perfect pieces of playcraft in years’.17 Peculiarly, the Evening Standard described the play as a ‘comedy of manners’, while the Culture Wars reviewer praised it as ‘an impressive piece, with an intricately crafted plot, generous characterisation, wonderfully subtle humour and an ambitious thematic scope’.18
A young woman in her late twenties and a man in his mid-fifties meet in an anonymous office staff common room. The young woman has sought him out after accidentally seeing his photo in a trade magazine. She seems to have come to confront him; he is anxious not to be alone with her in a closed room. It soon emerges that fifteen years previously the two had had a sexual relationship – when she was twelve, and he was forty. This is the scenario for Blackbird, which was commissioned for the Edinburgh International Festival and premiered at the King’s Theatre on 15 August 2005, directed by Peter Stein. The combination of controversial subject matter, a major theatre festival and a high-profile director meant that Blackbird attracted considerable media attention and has since travelled extensively.
The play is partly derived from a 2003 child abuse case. Thirty-one-year-old American, Toby Studebaker, groomed a twelve-year-old British girl over the internet before running away with her to Paris to have sex. After five days in Europe with Studebaker, the girl returned to her parents of her own will, while he was arrested and later jailed for abducting and sexually exploiting a minor. What appealed to Harrower was the way in which Studebaker ‘still went through with going away with her as if he was thinking he would test the limits of the moral world’.19 According to Stein, when he met Harrower with an early draft of the play he shared his own experience of ‘a devouring love for a younger woman’, encouraging the playwright to structure the work around ‘a metaphor of love. It must be about leaving. That is the problem of love. It starts, then it dies. Or you leave.’20 It is not insignificant that neither Harrower nor Stein uses the word paedophilia (in an interview for Theatrevoice the first word Harrower uses for the relationship is ‘affair’; Stein prefers to talk about love). Studebaker notwithstanding, Nabokov’s Lolita is the more immediate point of reference, even though Stein denies this.21
Throughout, the play sustains an acute level of ambivalence and emotional tension. Una’s purpose in meeting with Peter, who now calls himself Ray, is unclear. Is she there to trap him, to oblige him to apologise, to kill him or to seduce him? His reaction to her is initially fearful and defensive. Harrower harnesses the dramatic energy of taboo as the characters reel through emotions ranging from rage to guilt to desire and disgust. The stark force of the dialogues, the potent sense of the inadequacy of language to capture complex and contradictory emotions and lapses into silence showcase Harrower’s writerly aptitude, last fully witnessed in Knives in Hens. Pace is modulated not only by the varying nature of exchange, but also through the strategic use of monologue. In establishing their versions of the past, Una and Ray each deliver compelling, uninterrupted speeches. Una’s precedes Ray’s and is considerably longer – her voice was the one silenced by official authority before, now she is determined to be heard. Chillingly she describes her intense feeling of abandonment, rather than the expected sense of violation: ‘You left me alone. Bleeding. You left me. You left me in love’ (p. 59). The accusatory tenor of her monologue is countered by Ray’s defence of his actions, his declaration of his intention to return. In reconstructing their memories and emotions, both Una and Ray figuratively return to the courtroom and dissect their actions in a manner impossible during the investigation and trial fifteen years previously.
What follows is arguably the play’s coup de théâtre – there is an unexplained blackout. As Daniel Schlusser notes in his review of the Edinburgh and Berlin productions of the play, this moment can be rendered to produce powerfully differing effects. In Stein’s production the sense that the blackout in the fictional world of the play functions as a metaphor for Una’s situation in the past and present cystallised. In Benedict Andrews’s Schaubühne premiere of the play the blackout was extended, leaving the audience in doubt as to whether there really had been a power cut, thus creating the feeling of ‘disorientation and powerlessness’ just articulated by Una in her monologue.22
Harrower furnishes the play with a number of suggestive images that expressively echo its themes. Most evident is the rubbish-strewn set which functions metaphorically to recall the emotional mess of the half-finished encounter that yokes the characters’ destinies. Ominously the cathartic outburst as they kick the contents of the overflowing bin around the room segues into tentative sexual contact in the midst of the debris they have just scattered around. The gesture is physically initiated and then halted by Ray. Again, his actions can be interpreted in hugely divergent ways – is he just a pathetic older man suffering from impotence, is he actively tearing away from the past, or as Una brutally remarks, ‘Am I too old?’ (p. 81). The play’s title also unfolds a set of polymorphous symbolic possibilities. In Biblical terms black birds, more specifically ravens, are associated with retribution and responsible for pecking out the eyes of sinners (Proverbs 30.17 and Isaiah 34.11). This chimes with Ray’s discomfort at the beginning of the play when he compulsively rubs his reddened eyes. Albert Williams’s review of the Chicago production of the play notes the use of Paul McCartney’s 1968 song ‘Blackbird’, whose lyrics provide an apt account of the traumatised Una, as opening music.23
At the core of Blackbird’s disturbing energy is the radical undecidability of Una’s character. The play is deliberately provocative in the questions it raises, yet ironically it is Ray, the paedophile, who emerges as the more readable, even mildly sympathetic, character. As she states herself, Una’s whole life has been shaped by the experience. Ray’s plea that he is ‘entitled to something. To live’ (p. 28), to forget, is ferociously rebuffed:
I did the sentence. I did your sentence. For fifteen years. I lost everything. I lost more than you ever did. I lost because I never had time to begin. […] I kept my name. […] I re-live it every day. (p. 28)
Even as the play delicately balances the characters’ positions, the elliptical suggestion of the spurned female as mortal threat is naggingly present. Peter’s illicit sexual desire for a child is softened by the suggestion that she was, like Lolita, wise beyond her years, a provocateur who led him astray. Stein asserts that ‘it’s a play about love’, but then somewhat contradictorily goes on to claim that ‘It’s also about a world where 12-year-olds are treated as consumers, where advertising uses sex as a means of enticement and where kids have easy access to internet porn’, introducing the suggestion of a social critique that is frankly absent both in the play and in his production of it.24 Rather, the child Una is represented as endowed with adult agency and self-aware sexuality, while Peter’s responsibility as an adult not to respond is obscured by the assertion of consensual love. When she returns as an adult, Una is a manipulative, damaged force of destruction. Notably Stein’s production altered the play’s conclusion. The littered office setting is removed and the final moments of the play are relocated to a car park where Una and Ray physically wrestle with each other in a dramatic finale. The closing image is of raw mortal combat. The play text offers a less sensational though more desolate conclusion, as Ray shoves Una aside as he flees to join his partner and her daughter. Perhaps inspired by Stein’s directorial treatment, American director Stuart Carden remarked, ‘In many ways, it’s a car wreck of a play. You feel a simultaneous impulse to look and look away.’25 Charged with grim visceral emotion, Blackbird is a mesmerising work.
No unifying set of concerns can be easily identified in Harrower’s work. Consequently, although he is frequently mentioned in academic works on British or Scottish theatre, often this is little more than name-checking or brief explanatory discussion. Aleks Sierz, for instance, discusses Harrower’s Knives in Hens in the final chapter of In-Yer-Face Theatre, focusing upon violence and language. Contrasting its aesthetics with ‘in-yer-face’ drama, Sierz describes how the play’s violence is ‘shrouded in words […] the intense and sensuous language, and the production’s restrained mime of the killing, distanced the audience’.26 Jean-Pierre Simard likewise produced a reading of Knives in Hens focused on the poetic tools of initiation in a 2001 issue of Études écossaises. Dominic Dromgoole gives Harrower a chapter in The Full Room, offering an impressionistic account of Knives in Hens, and defending Kill the Old Torture Their Young as ‘wholly original and wholly refreshing’.27 More recently, Ian Brown’s chapter on contemporary Scottish theatre in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature portrays Harrower as ‘a leading member’ of his generation and concisely surveys his plays with the exception of Presence, devoting most space to an appraisal of Blackbird. For Brown, Harrower
deals – sometimes with bleak comedy – with the irresistible and irresoluble conflict between passion and accepted mores, the subversion of reason, the new rationalisations constantly invented to justify the unreasonable and the pain of the unachievable and deeply desired.28
Christina Wald, defining the term Trauma Drama, notes Blackbird among a burgeoning list of plays about sexual child abuse.29 Caridad Svich, in a review of Joe Mantello’s production of Blackbird in New York, also comments on the genre of the play as Trauma Drama, suggesting nevertheless that
it manages primarily by virtue of Harrower’s forceful and elliptical way with language to skirt the queasy comfort of the familiar. For Harrower, as in his previous works […], language is not in concert with but rather at odds with nature and the body. The erotic charge in his work, thus, comes from the disjunction between thought and action, and in inchoate and perhaps unreliable manifestation of feeling.30
Harrower’s adept and evocative use of language is regularly highlighted in various reviews and is given some welcome sustained attention by Alison Croggon in her appraisal of a recent Australian production of Knives in Hens. 31
In the work that pertains to Scotland what can be observed is a deconstructive attitude to existing notions of Scottish identity. As David Pattie contends, one might see the work of Harrower, Chris Hannan, Stephen Greenhorn, Gregory Burke and David Greig as:
creat[ing] a composite image, not only of Scotland, but also of the contemporary nation-state, that does not trade on the idea that a country’s essential qualities can be revealed through the study of its people and the societies they create. Rather, their work tends to suggest that national and cultural identity is always in the process of formation, that it is always up for grabs, and that any attempt to arrive at a final definition of identity […] will be doomed to failure.32
Pattie goes on to discuss Dark Earth in terms of a post-devolution need to re-map Scotland. The play’s characters
are forced into sharp opposition because the versions of Scotland they inhabit cannot be reconciled [and ultimately] the elements that split one Scotland from the other [are] not history or culture, so much as class and income.33
Questions of historical continuity and rupture, tradition and innovation and contemporary Scottish identity are teased out in various articles by Jean-Pierre Simard in his work on Scottish theatre and with respect to Harrower specifically, and by Danièle Berton-Charrière in an essay on Dark Earth. 34
As a playwright and adaptor, Harrower’s position within English and Scottish theatre seems assured. Since his debut he has had the strong support of the Traverse Theatre and a successful relationship with a number of major theatres in London. While this career in terms of his own writing has been a good deal more modest than the accomplishment of Knives in Hens, the immense success and publicity surrounding Blackbird has clearly rebooted his profile as a playwright of talent.
Knives in Hens (1995; London: Methuen Drama, 1997).
Kill the Old Torture Their Young (London: Methuen Drama, 1998).
Presence (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).
Dark Earth (London: Faber & Faber, 2003).
Blackbird (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
Anon., ‘Critics’ Guide to the Fringe’, Evening Standard, 1 August 2003 <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/article-6036557-critics-guide-to-thefringe.do>
—, ‘Edinburgh Shrapnel’, Encore Theatre Magazine website, 23 September 2003 <www.encoretheatremagazine.co.uk>
—, ‘12 Key Scottish Plays 1970–2010’, National Library of Scotland, <www.nls.uk/Scottish-theatre/knives-in-hens/index.html>
Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
Berton-Charrière, Danièle, ‘Parcours et détours en Écosse Dark Earth de David Harrower’, Études écossaises, No. 10 (2005), pp. 205–16.
Billington, Michael, ‘I Don’t Read New Work’, Guardian, 15 August 2005 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/aug/15/theatre.edinburghfestival20055> Brown, Ian, ‘Staging the Nation: Multiplicity and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Scottish Theatre’, in Ian Brown et al. (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature Volume 3, Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918) (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007), pp. 283–94.
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1. Jean-Pierre Simard, ‘Populaire, politique et poétique réévaluer la réputation du théâtre Écossais’, p. 187.
2. Anon., ‘12 Key Scottish Plays 1970–2010’.
3. Philip Fisher, ‘Interview with David Harrower’.
4. Ibid.
5. Alison Croggon, Review of Knives in Hens.
6. Mark Fisher, Guardian, 11 February 2005 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/feb/11/theatre1>
7. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke and O. B. Hardison (eds), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 490–5, provides an extended survey of definitions and debates around this trope.
8. Michael Raab, ‘Kryptischer Schotte’, p. 45. Thanks to Natascha Brakop for the translation. a
9. Marc Augé, Non-Places, pp. 33–4.
10. Brian Logan, ‘I’m Tired of Telling Well Crafted Stories’; Susannah Clapp, Observer, Theatre Record, Vol. XXI, No. 9 (2001), p. 526.
11. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXI, No. 9 (2001), p. 528.
12. Danièle Berton-Charrière, ‘Parcours et détours en Écosse Dark Earth de David Harrower’, p. 205.
13. Ian Brown, ‘Staging the Nation’, p. 292.
14. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold; Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, p. 54.
15. Berton-Charrière, ‘Parcours et détours en Écosse Dark Earth de David Harrower’, p. 216.
16. Michael Billington, Guardian, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 18 (2003), ‘Edinburgh Supplement’, pp. 1099–100.
17. Anon., ‘Edinburgh Shrapnel’.
18. Anon., ‘Critics’ Guide to the Fringe’; Tim Markham, Review of Dark Earth.
19. Kate Kellaway, ‘The Director Who Invited His Whole Cast to Tuscany’.
20. Ibid.
21. Fisher, ‘Interview with David Harrower’; Michael Billington, ‘I Don’t Read New Work’.
22. Daniel Schlusser, ‘Two Ways of Looking at Blackbird’.
23. Albert Williams, ‘In David Harrower’s Blackbird, It’s Complicated’.
24. Billington, ‘I Don’t Read New Work’.
25. Alice T. Carter, ‘City Theatre Set to Ruffle Feathers with Blackbird’.
26. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, p. 208.
27. Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room, p. 137.
28. Brown, ‘Staging the Nation’, p. 292.
29. Christina Wald, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia, p. 100.
30. Caridad Svich, ‘Ordinary Sites of Transgression’, p. 88.
31. Croggon, Review of Knives in Hens.
32. David Pattie, ‘Mapping the Territory’, pp. 144–5.
33. Ibid., pp. 154–5.
34. See Simard, ‘Populaire, politique et poétique réévaluer la réputation du théâtre Écossais’, and Berton-Charrière, ‘Parcours et détours en Écosse Dark Earth de David Harrower’.