The brand new theatrical adaptation of Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Lifeless' is a dizzying masterpiece, stitching collectively the numerous themes of the unique e book right into a spellbinding night time out.
Presently taking part in on the Barbican in London, UK, theatre firm Complicité’s adaptation will go on to tour different UK cities earlier than reaching Germany, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, and France.
On the night time I went to see Drive Your Plow, Tokarczuk herself was within the viewers to witness how Complicité, helmed by director Simon McBurney, turned the dense novel right into a sub-three-hour play.
Set in a Polish countryside village close to the border of Czechia, Drive Your Plow follows Janina Duszejko, an aged semi-retired trainer. The forthright eccentric Janina lives amongst a cohort of different oddballs in her distant neighborhood. There’s Oddball himself, the nickname she provides her equally eccentric neighbour, in addition to different vibrant characters just like the William Blake fanboy Dizzy and the beetle-obsessed entomologist Boros.
If at first the setting looks like an enthralling backdrop for pensioner comedy, that impression shortly adjustments when the primary of a number of lifeless our bodies exhibits up. Somebody or one thing is selecting off the boys of this rural haven. The murders all goal villagers who've been merciless to animals and Janina turns into lifeless set on a principle. The animals are taking revenge. What’s extra, Janina’s two canines have gone lacking.
Complicité and McBurney have made their title for his or her complicated literary theatrical diversifications, taken from web page to stage via a company-wide devising course of.
The emphasis on devised theatre is obvious right here. No author is credited beside Tokarczuk and far of the play’s dialogue comes from Janina as she speaks candidly to the viewers, possible utilizing many strains instantly lifted from the unique novel.
Performed eloquently and empathetically by Amanda Hadingue, stepping in for Kathryn Hunter as a consequence of sickness on the night time I attended, Janina’s monologue to the viewers is seamlessly interspersed by an extremely inventive multimedia theatrical manufacturing.
Janina breaks from her narration to work together with actors taking part in Oddball, Boros, Dizzy, and a litany of different distinctive characters, together with charity store proprietor Good Information, hunter Huge Foot, brothel proprietor Innerd, and mushroom foraging membership president, The President. However past the characters, the ensemble additionally makes use of bodily theatre to embody animals, the setting and cosmic our bodies. Naked but ingenious staging brings the desolate rural setting to life, as projections and video content material paint on further layers of which means.
Drive Your Plow has been described as a noir eco-thriller, a becoming style given the overarching homicide plot in opposition to the backdrop of animal cruelty. The novel is a lot greater than that although. It’s a craving story of downtrodden weirdos residing on the fringe of society and rebelling cynicism via their worldly cares. For Boros it’s his beetles, Dizzy has William Blake, and for Janina it's a love of animals as equal to people. A deep-seated animalist and humanist, she has utter religion within the divinity of all the things, inserting nice significance on horoscope readings.
What makes the Complicité adaptation of Drive Your Plow so spectacular is it doesn’t distil or take away any of the novel’s expansive themes. By way of jaw-dropping theatrical units to the uncooked pulsating vividness of Tokarczuk’s authentic writing, the Silesian countryside involves life because the setting for a gripping thriller, and a life-affirming existential howl.
Tokarczuk received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. For anybody even barely excited by her literary expertise, this new stage adaptation is a should see.
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