Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead 12
Based on the novel by Olga Tokarczuk

Complicité, London, England
Director: Simon McBurney
Performed in English with Hungarian subtitle
3 hours with 1 breaks.
A Complicité co-production with Barbican London, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Bristol Old Vic, Comédie de Genève, Holland Festival, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, L'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, The Lowry, The National Theatre of Iceland, Oxford Playhouse, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
The world-renowned international touring company Complicité presents a new work for the theatre, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, directed by Simon McBurney.
Based on Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name, the darkly comic, anarchic noir caused a seismic reaction in Tokarczuk’s native Poland due to its defiant attack on authoritarian structures, with right-wing press branding the writer an ‘eco-terrorist’ and national traitor. The story begins in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. Men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko – an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, devoted astrologer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake – has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the community shares their isolated, rural home, and she believes they are acting strangely… Engaged in fierce resistance against the injustices around her, Janina refuses to be a prisoner of society and gender. Her actions ask questions both of the male world which surrounds her and of our deeper human intentions: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be animal, and can we separate the two? Why is the killing of animals sport and that of humans murder? A thought-provoking, wry and otherworldly murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a tale about the cosmos, poetry, and the limitations and possibilities of activism.
Actors
Thomas Arnold
Johannes Flaschberger
Amanda Hadingue
Kathryn Hunter
Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer
Weronika Maria
Tim McMullan
César Sarachu
Sophie Steer
Alexander Uzoka
Stage and costume designer: Rae Smith
Dramaturge: Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook
Lighting design: Paule Constable
Sound design: Christopher Shutt
Video design: Dick Straker
Additional direction: Kirsty Housley
Movement: Toby Sedgwick
Original compositions: Richard Skelton
Original novel translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A Complicité co-production with Barbican London, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Bristol Old Vic, Comédie de Genève, Holland Festival, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, L'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, The Lowry, The National Theatre of Iceland, Oxford Playhouse, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
Simon McBurney