Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 11 June

The power of words or more particularly the power of names frame David Harrower’s Knives In Hens. Husband, Wife, Miller, Ploughman, this is a world where nouns define your life and adjectives are superfluous.

At the heart of the story is the journey of Susan Vidler’s Wife. Tongue-tied, superstitious and under the thumb of her brutal, distant Ploughman husband (Duncan Anderson) she knows the names of the things that surround her: fields, trees, horses. But she wants more, she wants to give names to things that have never had them before, including her own feelings, and when she meets Owen Whitelaw’s lonely Miller, words bind them together and unlock something powerful inside her.

Vidler is superb, travelling from fearful to coquettish to fierce to confident over the course of the play, but it’s in the scenes of discovery with Whitelaw’s Miller that she is at her best. Watching her in these moments is almost like catching a caterpillar half way through it’s transformation into a butterfly and it’s an equally fascinating and fragile change.

In additon to Vidler, Anderson and Whitelaw on stage is dancer Vicki Manderson whose presence as a spirit of chaos adds to the already disturbing and nightmarish feeling of the play. It’s an addition that could be, but never is, overplayed.

Director Lies Pauwels and designer Chloe Lamford have created an oppressive, claustrophobic setting – the choice to show time passing through the accretion of whisky bottles is inspired – where the words add to the sense of walls closing in especially in the moments where the characters speak directly into microphones, enforcing the intimate power of Harrower’s unparalleled dialogue.

Knives In Hens premièred at the Traverse in 1995 and has since gone on to be considered a Scottish classic. Unlike many other plays however it’s not burdened by cultural relevance to a specific age and the timeless quality of both setting and language allow it to be interpreted by new generations of directors each finding new depths in the texts.

Lies Pauwels and The National Theatre of Scotland have created a production that can only add to the play’s reputation and have created utterly absorbing drama at the Traverse. There’s a name for this sort of thing and that’s brilliant.