Knives in Hens is a play about a love triangle set against a pre-industrial landscape. First staged at the Traverse Theatre in 1995, the piece was David Harrower’s first professionally produced work. It has since then been staged in 25 countries around the world.
The director of this first Ukrainian version (talented Olga Turutia-Prasolova) was selected as part of the British Council’s annual theatre programme, and the new production will become part of the Ivan Franko National Academic Theatre’s programme for 2015/16.
The production process has taken two months and has seen a two-way exchange between the UK and Ukrainian theatre communities. The production has been advised (and the director mentored) by London’s Young Vic theatre director Joe Hill-Gibbins; and the British Council has delivered stage design, musical scoring and sound engineering workshops in the past 2 months.
About Knives in Hens:
In a pre-industrial, God-fearing community, an unsettling and threatening love triangle emerges between a young woman, the local ploughman and the hated town’s miller. As the woman journeys from ignorance to knowledge, her liberation is found through the discovery of a language which corresponds with her feelings.
The National Theatre of Scotland has praised the work as ‘a remarkable play about the transformative power of knowledge and an emerging consciousness as the world moves from rural to the urban and the industrial’
Knives in Hens premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in June 1995, and transferred to the Bush Theatre in London a few months later. It was David Harrower’s first professionally produced play, and has since then been produced in London, Berlin, Scandinavia, Austria and New York. Other plays by David Harrower include A Quiet Night In, the libretto for the opera Cat Man’s Tale and an adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids.
Translation (English to Ukrainian): Oleksa Negrebetskiy
Editing: Pavlo Iurov
Director: Olga Turutisa-Prasolova
Assistant director: Nina Lapshina
Cast: Vira Zinevych, Natalia Nenuzhna, Dmytro Zavadskiy, Renta Settarov, Dmytro Cherenov, Yaroslav Gurevych, Olena Ivasiva, Tetyana Lutsenko, Dmytro Lukianenko, Roman Shepel.
Choreographer – Olga Semoshkina;
Light designer - Yevgeny Golovin,
Sound director – Oleksandr Plisa.
Art director of the Ivan Franko National Theatre – Stanislav Moyseev