Evening Standard 4 stars out of 5
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead at the Barbican review: a loyal but innovative adaptation
The production wonderfully brings to life the dry comedy and compelling strangeness of the original text
By Farah Najib
In true Complicité style, the company’s adaptation of Nobel prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel is visually exciting, technologically slick, and deliciously dark. The story revolves around astrology-obsessed, animal-loving Janina, a middle-aged woman living on a mountainside in a remote corner of Poland. When men from the local hunting club begin dropping dead in dramatic fashion, she suggests that the animal community is seeking revenge for their mistreatment – but is repeatedly laughed out of the room for her seemingly crackpot beliefs.
Fans of the novel won’t be disappointed. This is a loyal but innovative adaptation (dramaturgy by Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook) that wonderfully brings to life the dry comedy and compelling strangeness of the text – supported, of course, by Amanda Hadingue at the helm, who has stepped in to cover Kathryn Hunter’s unfortunate sudden illness.
Hadingue is intensely watchable, instilling the character with a playful fieriness and wit that puts the audience right in the palm of her hand as she addresses them directly through a centre-stage mic. We’re brought into this world through hereyes, and she only ever relinquishes that storytelling control briefly, to a privileged few. It’s a smart directorial choice that reflects the unreliable nature of the book’s narrative voice.
The ensemble is a small but mighty troupe of physical performers who render animals with their bodies; splayed hands conjure deer’s’ antlers, others frolic, fox-like, over imagined landscapes. Party guests seen through windows, dancing and contorting to thumping music while wearing costume animal heads is a particularly memorable visual; it’s enjoyably eery, and taps into the thematic question of whether animals and humans are really that different. Some ensemble members also take on lynchpin characters – César Sarachu is great as Janina’s awkward but lovable neighbour, Oddball.
Design on all fronts is masterful. Christopher Stutt’s filmic, foreboding sound design, together with a monochromatic stage and icy lighting (design by Paule Constable) do well to immerse us in the setting’s frigid, unforgiving climes. And of course, there’s the Complicité tech-cleverness, with ongoing video projections that convey everything from mountainous landscapes to astrological charts to William Blake quotes to the bleeding bodies of hunted deer.
Despite the warmth and charisma of the central protagonist, this production is decidedly creepy. Dead boars speak through Janina, contorted corpses resurrect to argue their side. Simon McBurney’s direction has rendered this tale into something of a ghost story – an eco-horror, if you will.
Tokarczuk’s novel doesn’t need bringing up to date, as its themes of animal cruelty, climate crisis, misogyny, and religious morality are still fairly pressing (in case you hadn’t noticed). This production leans into those themes, without over-egging it. This has been worth the wait, and is well worth a watch.
Time Out 4 stars out of 5
‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ review
Understudy Amanda Hadingue gives a huge performance in Complicté’s thrilling adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s eco-noir
Wizards of the theatre, shamans of the stage and undoubtedly one of the greatest theatre companies to have ever existed, anywhere, Simon McBurney’s Complicité stage the unstageable with supernatural panache.
Nonetheless, cruel reality caught up with the company on the press night for its adaptation of Nobel-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’: lead actor Kathryn Hunter was taken ill shortly before curtain-up, causing the show to be cancelled.
The implication is that Hunter will return later this week (and I suspect the show will return), but for the rescheduled press performance her understudy Amanda Hadingue took on the lead role.
And what a monumental role it is. You can see why Hadingue couldn’t just be plonked on as a last-minute press night replacement. ‘Lead actor’ scarcely does justice to the gargantuan part of Janina Duszejko, an aging lady from rural Poland who serves as the antagonist to Tokarzuk’s exhilaratingly wild story, a heady mix of noir-ish murder mystery, haunting eco-thriller and more.
The three-hour play is, in essence, a fantastically souped-up monologue. Hadingue’s Janina constantly complains of her invisibility as an older woman, but here she literally takes the mic, jealously guarding a centre-stage microphone as she shares her story with us: confiding, narrating, soliloquising… and of course, interacting with the rest of cast. But this is Janina’s world – everyone else is just a guest.
Hadingue is terrific, but also so dominant that it’s hard to really picture how the show might be with Hunter. It’s possible they’re giving very similar performances. But I’ve heard that that’s not the case. It’s a fact that Hunter is renowned for her eccentric clowning and full-bodied physical performances. What’s perhaps most striking about Hadingue’s Janina is how normal she is. Yes, she’s an eccentric, a rural recluse obsessed with horoscopes who becomes increasingly consumed by a sense of burning injustice at mankind’s treatment of nature, convinced that a series of local murders are the work of a vengeful natural world. But she’s also disarmingly down-to-earth, explaining herself to us with a plaintive frankness and wry humour that takes us with her to some pretty strange places. She’s like an old friend, matily regaling us with scarcely believable stories as if they were neighbourhood gossip.
I’m wary of spoilers here: the mystery-style format does lend itself to being spoiled. So it’s best not to get too deep into the plot, save to note that it begins with Janina discovering the murder of her hated neighbour Bigfoot, which she fancies to be the responsibility of a pair of onlooking stags, and accelerates from there, as more and more murders stack up.
If Hadingue is the show’s skeleton and muscles, then everything else in McBurney’s production exists to give depth and detail. It doesn’t need its evocative stream of visual set-pieces to work, from a creepy masked ball to Janina and two friends getting stoned under twinkly projections of the heavens. Its physical flourishes – actors playing dogs and deer – are just a bonus. But they add a beautiful richness to ‘Drive Your Plow…’, a sense that we’re here to bear witness to a proper story, told carefully and with ceremony, not just a twisty thriller banged out. Tokarczuk is a remarkable, almost unclassifiable, writer. If this is probably her most accessible novel, it still requires a singular company to take it on, one that can conjure not just the plot beats, but the book’s sense of nightmare/dream, its evocation of woods and borders and man’s uneasy relationship with age and death and nature.
Compared to 2015’s mind-blowing ‘The Encounter’ – the last ‘proper’ Complicité show – ‘Drive Your Plow…’ is more recognisably theatre as we know it, and by the impossibly high bar the company has set it’s reasonably conventional. But you don’t need to change the game every time: it’s just a joy to see the old magic flow forth once again.