LIES PAUWELS’S KNIVES IN HENS: A VERY EUROPEAN EXPERIMENT
MARK BROWN
Scotland – in marked contrast to many of the nations surrounding it, such as Ireland, England and Norway – does not have a strong theatrical tradition.[1] Belgium – in the words of one Flemish dramatist Lies Pauwels – “does not have a tradition of written plays”.[2] What they have instead is, in the case of Scotland, a notable flourishing of theatre writing in recent decades[3] and, in the case of Belgium, a deservedly strong reputation for devised theatre.[4]
In its 2011 production of David Harrower’s[5] modern classic Knives in Hens, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) offered audiences a fascinating combination of contemporary Scottish theatre writing and (by bringing in Pauwels as director) Belgian devised drama. The announcement of this bold, European experiment illuminated three interesting truths: firstly, the extraordinary stature of the play (how many 16-year old dramas are considered robust enough to be turned over to a radical dramatist such as Pauwels?); secondly, the openness of the NTS[6] to risk taking and theatrical innovation; and thirdly, the strong connections which have been developed between the theatres of Scotland and Belgium (and, more specifically, Flanders).[7]
The making of a classic
Knives in Hens well deserves its reputation as a classical modern drama. First staged – at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh – in 1995, it has become one of the most performed Scottish plays of all time. It has been translated into more than 20 languages,[8] performed in at least 25 countries,[9] and has received more than 70 productions worldwide[10] (although, perhaps surprisingly, Pauwels’s production was only the third to be staged in Scotland). Indeed, in many ways, the play has become a calling card for contemporary Scottish theatre, a leading indicator of just how far and, in historical terms, how fast, Scottish theatre writing has developed over the last five decades.[11]
The source of the play’s fascination for audiences is not difficult to discern. A three-actor drama, set in an abstract, pre-industrial society, it centres upon the increasingly intense relationship between an illiterate (and, appropriately, unnamed) young woman and an educated miller. The woman is neglected, emotionally and sexually, by her horse-obsessed ploughman husband (who is cruelly, if accurately, nicknamed “Pony William” by the gossips of the village). The miller is despised by the villagers, partly on account of the share of their grain which he takes when he mills their flour, but also because his literacy and knowledge are viewed with fear and suspicion.
In its brilliant imagining of a point in time, and its assiduous refusal to attempt to create an “accurate” historical moment, Harrower’s piece bears a strong relationship to the work of such dramatists as Howard Barker, Schiller or Shakespeare. However – where such writers replace “historical accuracy” with an imaginative landscape which is filled, primarily, with dense, poetic language – Harrower’s play is distinguished by its extraordinary sparseness, both in language and action. It is a drama in which remarkably little is said, and even less is done. Its poetics are a poetics of atmosphere, of a young woman awakening from intellectual, emotional and sexual ignorance and, in so doing, connecting her burgeoning humanity with that of an undeservedly lonely and hated man.
The following short speech, from early in the play – which is made by the young woman in response to her husband’s suggestion that she is “like a field” – gives a strong sense of the spare, elemental poetry of the piece: “I’m not a field. How’m I a field? What’s a field? Flat. Wet. Black with rain. I’m no field.”[12]
Fascinatingly, this beautifully sparse play came out of a much larger, much more densely written drama. Harrower’s own account of the birth of the piece is worth quoting at length:
Knives in Hens was written in 1993 when I was 27, a frustrating, going-round-in-circles time, when Scottish playwrights and their work were largely absent from the main Scottish stages, because – I was told by an esteemed artistic director – audiences just won’t come to see Scottish work. Times do change.
But, back then, I was reduced to hawking my work around various literary directors and associates, nodding at their verdicts and advice even as in the theatre behind them would be the set for some play or other that I was resolute would mean nothing to me or the country or times I lived in.
I was dismissive in ‘93, aggrieved, annoyed, raging in fact, and spectacularly unproduced. Knives came out of a long, fulminating play about land ownership in Lowland Scotland, the countryside surrounding Edinburgh where I was born and brought up. In it a travelling storyteller come to market tells a story of a wife and her ploughman and her journey to the mill and what befalls her there.
That larger play is long cold in the ground, but this small sketch of a story remained with me. I wrote it quickly, no hesitancy as to its merit or historical accuracy. I just wanted it out. And as I wrote, the metaphysical of it suddenly came into view; the liberation of not [thinking] ‘how was it then?’ (the stuck realism of that), but the ‘what if it was like this?’ How did (does) a person’s language and imaginative reach widen? How [do] the concepts of themselves and their place in the world get fixed? And how [do] they then get tested?
So, I’ll say it. I bloody love this play. It means the world to me. It’s where I found my voice; the play in which I shed notions of how a play must be written that I’d held for a long enough time; the play that suggested I was maybe, just maybe, mastering this slippery craft. I could go on, bore you rigid – I won’t, I’ve said more than enough. Words can kill things as much as enlighten.[13]
These comments on the process of the play’s creation – which are positively Barkerian in their hostility towards “stuck” (or static) realism and their liberated attitude to the reimagination of a historical moment – give superb insights into the heart of a play which some find “mysterious”.[14] If the drama is indeed, mysterious, its mystery lies within its capacity to make us feel things which we find very difficult, if not impossible to articulate. As it moulds the essential humus of human life (language, sexuality, love, fear, wonder, spiritual pain) it expresses the mysterious in ways which fit very well with Albert Einstein’s definition:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity… [15]
Pauwels and the NTS: playing with Knives
The NTS would not have invited Pauwels to turn her hand to such an esteemed play unless they had expected her to be, simultaneously, faithful to its essence and disregarding of previous interpretations and any perceived notions of how the drama should be set. From the very outset of the production (which opened, appropriately, at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh – where the play premiered in 1995 – before touring throughout much of Scotland) it was clear that Pauwels and designer Chloe Lamford had visualised the piece in a very distinctive fashion. As I wrote in my review for the Sunday Herald newspaper:
[W]e are confronted with a set that looks like a circus rehearsal space, complete with a gymnast’s vaulting horse and an army of partially emptied bottles of alcohol.[16]
The unconventional approach to design – which eschewed the visual simplicity which most directors consider to be the natural corollary of the sparseness of the text – was repeated throughout Pauwels’s presentation. This included the addition of a fourth character; a female figure who alternated between a hyper-physical version of the woman and a disturbingly human representation of the pregnant mare to which the ploughman is so attracted.
Leading Scottish critic Joyce McMillan, of The Scotsman newspaper, gives a vividly accurate description of the opening scene, which was an entirely new invention of Pauwels:
The play opens with the ploughman’s wife and her poutingly sexed-up alter ego – electrifyingly played by Susan Vidler and Vicki Manderson [respectively] – rushing to the front of the stage, lifting up their punk-style kilt skirts, and repeatedly showing us their knickers, while Lulu’s Boom-Bang-A-Bang roars out on the sound system, and Duncan Anderson as the kilted ploughman keeps trying to scoop them up and return them to backstage decency.[17]
In addition to the postmodern clutter of the stage, and the deliberate crashing together of musical genres (Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion went up against Tammy Wynette singing Stand By Your Man), Pauwels also had the three actors (Manderson – who played the fourth, symbolic figure – is a dancer) speak much of the dialogue into microphones, while facing the audience. For Mark Fisher, Scottish critic of The Guardian, the cumulative effect of these innovations was uneven but, ultimately, effective:
It doesn’t always work, but in stretching, twisting and squeezing the play into new shapes, it reveals hidden corners and unexpected depths.[18]
McMillan, too, thought that Pauwels had succeeded in justifying her radical revisioning of the play:
In the end… there’s no dismissing the powerful riot of imagery Pauwels assembles, nor Susan Vidler’s magnificent performance as the wife, thoughtful, disturbing, and deeply sexual. This show will outrage many people; don’t go there if you don’t want to be irritated, baffled, amused, shaken and stirred. Once again, though, the NTS have defied expectations, to create a production that reinvents Harrower’s play as the kind of classic text on which directors can unleash their imaginations.[19]
These are not assessments that I share. In my opinion – whilst the introduction of the fourth character was an interesting and, often, effective addition – the overall effect of Pauwels’s innovations was to reduce the power of the play; to rob it of many of its psychological, emotional and erotic subtleties. The postmodern clash of musical styles and the presentation of the actors as a cross between stand-up comedians, karaoke singers and impromptu, ranting speakers undermined the undoubtedly sensual physicality of the production (and of Vidler’s performance in particular).
Nowhere was the piece’s lack of subtlety more clearly expressed than in Pauwels’s characterisation of the miller, of which I wrote:
The decision to give Owen Whitelaw’s miller a stammer (and attendant physical twitch) which, inevitably, he is cured of through his relationship with the young woman, is both an obvious and a destructive characterisation.[20]
Critic Michael Cox, writing for the theatre website OnstageScotland, broadly shared my opinion of the production:
[W]ith its forced-upon concept, the production comes across as an artistic war between writer and director, resulting in a production that is likely to split audiences. Those who like their theatre to be literate, and those who are fans of Harrower’s play, will probably dislike what they see, but those who like the experimental will probably find much to enjoy. I can’t say that I liked it, but I certainly admired it.[21]
His characterisation of the production as a “war between writer and director” is a sound description of a process of revision which, despite Pauwels’s claims to be honouring the play, actually bring her into profound conflict with the essential heart of Harrower’s drama; where the playwright offers a Barkerian (or Einsteinian) sense of human mystery, Pauwels’s substitutes the confusion of noise and physical frenzy and the glaring light of gratuitous explication (as in the heavy-handed symbolism of the stuttering miller).
Prior to the opening of her production, Pauwels said:
“There is a plot… there is this fantastic play of David Harrower. I’m really honoured that I can do it… But maybe it’s good that I don’t have this whole history [of thinking about] how fantastic the play is, so I am an innocent person doing this text.”[22]
One salutes both Pauwels’s fearless innocence and the NTS’s willingness to gamble upon it. However, the ultimate test of any reinterpretation of a classic play is, surely, whether it enhances or diminishes the text for an audience member who is unfamiliar with it. By that measure, Pauwels’s production is, in my estimation, a failure. It takes more from Harrower’s play than it gives to it. It would, I feel certain, be, primarily, a source of confusion for an audience member who had never seen or read Knives in Hens.
It did not generate “outrage” within me, as McMillan suggested it might in some people. Rather, despite its moments of startling inventiveness, it finally left my senses dulled and my mind unsatisfied. It was – like so much faux radical, postmodern theatre – ultimately a hollow experience, and hollowness is not a characteristic one expects of any production of Knives in Hens.
Mark Brown
A professional theatre critic since 1994, Mark Brown is currently drama critic of the Scottish national newspaper the Sunday Herald and a performing arts writer for the UK national newspaper the Daily Telegraph. His writing on theatre has appeared in many newspapers (The Guardian, The Herald, Scotland on Sunday, The Scotsman, the Toronto Star), magazines (the New Statesman, The List) and international journals (Critical Stages, New Theatre Quarterly, Sinais de Cena, Svět a Divadlo). In 1999 he received the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society’s Allen Wright Award for “outstanding arts journalism” by a young writer.
He teaches regularly at Scotland’s national conservatoire, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and is a former drama lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. He holds a Master of Research degree (from Strathclyde) on the work of the American theatre company the Riot Group. His edited collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe is published by Intellect Books.
[1] This is a contention widely accepted within Scotland, although challenged by some. It seems undeniable that the politics and theology of the Scottish Protestant Reformation of the 16th-century damaged Scottish theatre in a profound way. As Liz Lochhead – one of Scotland’s leading dramatists and the country’s Makar (national poet) – argues:
“[O]ur Reformation… stamped out all drama and dramatic writing for centuries… We have no Scottish Jacobean tragedies, no Scottish Restoration Comedies… Holy Willie and Tartuffe may be brother archetypes, but only one had a full five-act play written about him.”
From the introduction to Educating Agnes, Lochhead’s adaptation of Molière’s School for Wives, (Nick Hern Books: London, 2008, p.7).
[2] From an interview with Pauwels in the spring of 2011, by the National Theatre of Scotland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIj6o_vKvLc&feature=related.
[3] One might argue that Scotland’s finest ever playwrights are living dramatists, such as: John Byrne; David Greig; Chris Hannan; Zinnie Harris; David Harrower; Liz Lochhead; Anthony Neilson.
[4] A reputation built upon the work of companies such as Ontroerend Goed and Victoria.
[5] Widely acclaimed as one of Scotland’s finest dramatists, Harrower’s work includes the plays Kill the Old, Torture Their Young and Blackbird, and adaptations of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Büchner’s Woyzeck.
[6] The NTS was established in 2006, under artistic director Vicky Featherstone, as a self-defined “theatre without walls”; i.e. the company has no permanent theatre building, only administrative headquarters in Glasgow. With no theatre base, it is free to premiere its work anywhere in Scotland.
[7] Pauwels is a long-time collaborator of Ghent-based theatre company Victoria, who have a long history of presenting work at Glasgow’s renowned Tramway venue, and co-produced (with the NTS) the acclaimed Scottish production of Pol Heyvaert’s piece Aalst (which was originally created, in Flemish, for Victoria).
[8] Source: Arcola Theatre, London: http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?action=showtemplate&sid=388).
[9] Source: National Theatre of Scotland: www.nationaltheatrescotland.com).
[10] Source: Arcola Theatre, London.
[11] I offer this recent, anecdotal evidence. When I visited the Nova Drama festival in Bratislava, Slovakia in May 2011 and, in conversation with theatre people from central and eastern Europe, mentioned that I am a theatre critic from Scotland, the first topic of conversation which was raised was Knives in Hens.
[12] Source: National Library of Scotland: http://digital.nls.uk/scottish-theatre/knives-in-hens/index.html.
[13] As told to Irish theatre company Landmark Productions on the occasion of their 2009 production of Knives in Hens: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=164297244241.
[14] Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, February 8, 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/feb/08/knives-in-hens-review.
[15] From Einstein’s 1931 essay ‘The World As I See It’. From American Institute of Physics website: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm.
[16] Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, June 13, 2011: http://www.heraldscotland.com.
[17] Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, June 10, 2011: http://www.scotsman.com/features/Theatre-reviews-Knives-In-Hens.6781880.jp.
[18] Mark Fisher, The Guardian, June 8, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jun/08/knives-in-hens-review.
[19] Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, June 10, 2011: http://www.scotsman.com/features/Theatre-reviews-Knives-In-Hens.6781880.jp.
[20] Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, June 13, 2011: http://www.heraldscotland.com.
[21] Michael Cox, onstagescotland.co.uk, June 2011: http://www.onstagescotland.co.uk/reviews/knives_in_hens.
[22] From Pauwels’s NTS interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIj6o_vKvLc&feature=related
This article was originally published in the webjournal Prospero European Review (edition 2: 2011), which has since been taken down.
© Mark Brown
Scottish Stage 