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Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead
Barbican Theatre   Spring 2023

The stylish Complicite adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 Polish novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes us to the home of the teacher Janina living in a gloomy Polish forest near the Czech border. 

This is her story and she will stand centre stage for most of the three hours describing a terrible sequence of events that include the disappearance of her dogs and the mysterious murders of a number of its prominent male citizens.

Various other characters make brief appearances in her story. The first is her neighbour Oddball (César Sarachu), who arrives to tell her about his discovery of the dead body of Big Foot, who is also a neighbour. Big Foot has choked on a bone, which is assumed to be a natural death though Oddball has to give a statement to the police.

When Janina notices that the murder victims are all hunters, and in at least one case also involved in a project to clear the land for open-cast mining, she tells people that it must be the animals who are doing the killing. She backs up her claims with her astrology readings.

Not surprisingly, her friends Dizzy (Alexander Uzoka), the ex-student who is translating Blake into Polish, and Boros, who is researching beetles at risk of extinction, are sceptical of this idea. Even the young woman Good News (Weronika Maria) is doubtful of this explanation

Amanda Hadingue gave a warm engaging performance as Janina. However, the company have planned that Kathryn Hunter, who was suddenly taken ill on press night, will also play the part at times during its national tour.

The title of the play is taken from Blake’s poem Proverbs of Hell and at different points in the show lines from his poems are projected onto the back wall. Often they have a political ring as with 'a dog starv'd at his Master's Gate predicts the ruin of the State.'

Certainly, the bleak melancholy mood with its shades of a political noire mystery is intriguing, though the first half of the show feels slow, undeveloped and lacking a focus. Perhaps the intention is simply to convey the loneliness, isolation and sadness of its sympathetic characters that are Janina’s cluster of eccentric friends.

Oddball always seems awkward, stutters and is said by Janina to be suffering from testosterone syndrome. He is usually the bearer of bad news about another death.

The complete stranger Boros one day wandered into Janina's home and after a period of minimal conversation became a friend and later a romantic relationship.

In contrast to these apparent misfit outsiders, the police and the hunting clubs seem to possess a collective confidence in slaughtering animals and remaking the world. Occasionally in the second section, they give short speeches to crowds about the necessity of what they do. 

Complicite gives the performance a bleak downbeat atmosphere with the company of actors arranging themselves in ominous groups or mysterious anonymous figures at various places on the stage with the central lit figure of Janina being the main source of any light.

Janina’s worries about the killing of animals are lightened by her whimsical sense of humour though it doesn’t seem to connect much to either the story or the characters.

This slow-burn entertainment pessimistically engages with the frustrating difficulties of environmental activists trying to stop the powerful from destroying the planet. Complicité director Simon McBurney refers to Janina’s 'most wonderful soliloquy in a police station about the monstrosity of the industrial slaughter of animals to keep human appetite and greed satisfied.'

Let's hope that Olga Tokarczuk’s disturbing story is a glimpse of only a potential near future of the planet that will never happen.

Keith McKenna

Review of Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead -  Barbican Theatre 2023