Henhouse is the new play by award winning playwright Kaite O’Reilly. It charts the breakdown of a family against a background of civil war.

This could be Bosnia, Chechnya or ‘the next big thing.’ But these are the small people.

The production draws on Kaite O’Reilly’s experiences in frontline towns during the war in former Yugoslavia, and asks the central question: how do people hold on to normality? A bold ‘European’ playing style, with resonances from Beckett and Kröetz, drawing on mask techniques and the work of Kantor, Sturua and Dodin, offers a vision of a family on the edge of war. In more ways than one.

 

Kaite O’Reilly
Kaite’s first London production won the Peggy Ramsay Award with Yard, translated as Schlacthaus it ran in rep at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin, for two years. She has had plays at the Bush, Contact Manchester, Birmingham Rep, and at the Royal Court as part the of Young Writers Festival with Banshees. Graeae Theatre Co. performed the triumphant Peeling, touring nationally and internationally, playing Soho Theatre in 2002, and the Assembly rooms Edinburgh in 2003. She is currently under commission from Sgript Cymru, Liverpool Biennial Live Art Festival, and Theatr Asou with a forthcoming production in Graz, Austria, and a residency in Singapore this summer. “Quietly groundbreaking”
Joyce Macmillan on Peeling, The Scotsman

“O’Reilly’s dialogue has the punch and spareness of the late Sarah Kane”
Benedict Nightingale, The Times