David Harrower

Fifteen years ago, Una and Ray had a relationship. They haven't set eyes on each other since. Now she's found him again. Blackbird was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and premiered at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2005. The production transferred to the Albery Theatre, London, in February 2006, and went on to open at the Manhattan Theater Club, New York City, in April 2007.

A Play

Blackbird

Fifteen years ago Una and Ray had a relationship. They haven't set eyes on each other since. Now, years later, she's found him again. Blackbird premiered at King's Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, in August 2005, and transferred to the Albery Theatre in London's West End in 2006. The production received the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. In 2007, the play opened simultaneously at the Manhattan Theater Club in New York and and at American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco.

Annotation One of European theatre's major plays, Schiller's masterpiece hinges on a brilliantly imagined meeting between Mary, Queen of Scots - focus of simmering Catholic dissent and her cousin Elizabeth, Queen of England, who has imprisoned her. Isolated by their duplicitous male courtiers, the women collide headlong, each wrestling with the rank, ambition and destiny their births have bestowed, against a thrilling background of intrigue, plot and counter-plot.David Harrower's version of Mary Stuart premiered at the Citizen's Theatre, Glasgow, in October 2006.

Mary Stuart

Knives in Hens is a brutal fable set in a timeless spartan rural community "An outstanding new Scottish 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) Knives in Hens received its premiere at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh in June 1995 and transferred to the Bush Theatre in London in November 1995. "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)

Knives In Hens

THE STORY: Morna works as a cleaner for well-off families in Edinburgh. She spends her time drinking, attempting affairs and trying to understand her twenty-year-old son with whom she shares her Dalry flat. Athol, her elder brother by two years, lives nea

A Slow Air

Morna works as a cleaner in Edinburgh. She spends her time drinking, attempting affairs and trying to work out the mind of the twenty-year-old son with whom she shares her flat. Her elder brother, Athol, lives near Glasgow airport with his wife. The owner of a floor-tiling company, with two grown-up children, he's proud of his hard-won achievements since moving west. Between them, they have differing memories of their upbringing and their parents and definite opinions about each other. But these are left unsaid because Morna and Athol haven't spoken a word to each other in fourteen years . . . When Morna's son Joshua travels to see his uncle, he sets off a remarkable and life-changing series of events. A Slow Air by David Harrower premiered at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in April 2011, and transferred to the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

'I'm taking your eyes', he'd say, 'and keeping them safe.' 'I'm taking your ears and keeping them safe.' Ciara's father Mick kept her as his hidden treasure, making sure his only daughter was shielded from what he did and the men and women with whom he associated. Now Mick is dead and his legacy, so bound up in the landscape of Glasgow, that infamous no mean city, must be faced. As Ciara seeks to further the reputation of her art gallery, her world starts to fragment. Marked by the deep contradictions of her father, the art world and the place that made them all, she stands on a threshold. By confronting the past, her future blows wide open. Ciara by David Harrower premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2013.

Ciara

Kill the Old Torture their Young is an urban tragi-comedy from the acclaimed writer of Knives in Hens, one of Scotland's most talented new playwrights A documentary maker returns to the city of his birth. His task, to film his impressions. An old man remembers a time when eagles flew over the city. A TV executive reaches breaking point in the city he loves. A struggle actor seeks fame in a city that doesn't seem to want him. A young woman ends her artistic dreams in a city that eludes her. A receptionist tries to break the mould of her life in the city where she's always lived. A rock star sings to himself in a city he's forgotten the name of...Each of them has a story to tell, but who will listen?

Kill The Old, Torture Their Young

A young man has an affair with a married woman. He is terrified her husband will challenge him to a duel and kill him. Meanwhile he toys with the affections of another and, for a moment, life seems full of joy. The doorbell rings. The husband enters the room. Based on Schnitzler's play Liebelei, David Harrower's Sweet Nothings captures the power of sexual longing, the cruelty of tradition and the vulnerability of those in love. The play premieres at the Young Vic, London, in March 2010. 'I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?' Arthur Schnitzler.

Sweet Nothings

The news that a government inspector is due to arrive in a small Russian town sends its bureaucrats into a panicked frenzy. A simple case of mistaken identity exposes the hypocrisy and corruption at the heart of the town in this biting moral satire. David Harrower's version of Nikolai Gogol's Government Inspector premiered at the Warwick Arts Centre in May 2011 and transferred to Young Vic, London in June.

Gogol's Government Inspector

When Valerie and Euan's car breaks down in remote countryside near the Antonine Wall they have a problem. With their mobiles left at home and an evening out arranged in Glasgow, they have to find help fast. This comes in the form of Petey and Ida and their twenty-year-old daughter Christine, a farming family who live and breathe the history and traditions of the small area of earth they've made their home. Dark Earth premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in July 2003.

Dark Earth

The Chrysalids: The Play (adapted by David Horrower)

John Wyndham

In a world where deviations from the norm are considered evil, David's talent to communicate by thought is a crucial secret.

The Chrysalids

'I have no name for the thing which is in my head. It is not envy. It is more than envy. It does not scare me. I must look close enough to look at what it is.' A ploughman and his wife live a simple existence in a pre-industrial time until they, along with the hated local miller, are drawn into a struggle of knowledge, power and attraction. David Harrower's haunting play established him as one of the UK's leading contemporary playwrights. This new edition is published to coincide with the new production of this tense modern classic at the Donmar Warehouse in August 2017, directed by Yaël Farber.

Knives in Hens

The village has lied. William has lied. It is not because I am undeserving. Not because I am young and they are old. God has given them nothing. I know this now. Knives in Hens is a brutal fable set in a timeless spartan rural community. First staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in June 1995, before transferring to the Bush Theatre, London, in November 1995, the play was playwright David Harrower's first professionally produced work. It has been staged in twenty-five countries around the world and is widely acknowledged as a modern Scottish classic. A remarkable play about the transformative power of knowledge and an emerging consciousness as the world moves from rural to the urban and industrial. With an introduction by Mark Fisher.

David Harrower

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