David Harrower’s radical, ritualistic three-hander, premiered in 1995, explores the nature of words and labour, education and sexuality in a manner that is both sophisticated and primitive.
Ploughman Pony William (Christian Cooke) returns from the fields to interrupt his wife (Judith Roddy) – known only as Young Woman – as she is plucking a chicken for a quick, brutal roll on the floor.
Unable to lug the sacks of grain from their harvest over to Gilbert Horn the miller (Matt Ryan) due to a pregnant horse, William sends his wife instead.
But Horn is an outsider, a man of reading and writing who, it is said, murdered his wife.
Intrigued and frightened by the witchcraft of words and writing, the Young Woman becomes entangled in her own ambition to progress, to find words beyond the basic names of things – she is a poet-in-waiting.
Consequently the schooled and the unschooled, those who work the land and those who work machines and the power of language are all knotted together in a drama that resembles a medieval film noir.
Directed by Yael Farber, it has all her usual tropes – the low thrumming soundtrack that underscores the action, a constant haze that shrouds the edges of the stage in a mysterious miasma, the pungent aromas of earth and smoke.
On Soutra Gilmour’s simple but evocative set dominated by an enormous moon-like millstone, the three actors lug and climb, pluck and heave in a powerful illustration of the hard drudgery of a medieval peasant.
If some of the metaphors now seem a bit past their quote-by date, the language is taut and visceral and the dramatic impetus slow but inexorable.
Although its power to shock has diminished a little since its debut, the overall achievement remains impressive.
Donmar Warehouse, until October 7.
Tickets: 020 3282 3808