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Theatre can spotlight important books
A new adaptation of Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead should boost the impact of the Polish author’s powerful work.
Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated authors. She is also something of a controversial figure in her home country. Her 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was accused of inciting eco-terrorism when it was first published in Poland, and last year she declined an honorary citizenship from the region of Poland where she lives because she would have had to share the honour with an anti-LGBTQ Roman Catholic Bishop.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a vivid account of Janina, an elderly female eccentric – the kind of woman who often becomes invisible in society’s eyes – who finds herself investigating a series of grisly murders in the remote forest community in which she lives. While the book is at once a fable and thriller, it’s still comparatively more conventional, at least in narrative terms, than Flights, the tapestry-style meditation on travel and belonging, one of what she calls her “constellation novels”, which won the International Man Booker Prize in 2018.
This was the same year Tokarczuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature, a win that got somewhat eclipsed both by an earlier abuse scandal among the Nobel committee and their subsequent decision to also give the award to the Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic. Dismayingly, Tokarczuk’s success was almost overshadowed by the actions and arrogance of men.
The English translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was released by independent publisher Fitzcarraldo in 2018. In the US it was published by Penguin imprint Riverhead Books. It’s now the inspiration for a new theatre show by renowned international touring company Complicité. Founded in 1983, the company has acquired a global reputation for its adventurous and often technically innovative work. Led by artistic director Simon McBurney, one of the original co-founders along with Annabel Arden, Fiona Gordon and Marcello Magni, Complicité creates work of imagination, rigour and vision. The company also has form when it comes to adaptations of sprawling European novels. They’ve previously tackled Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—a performance the critic Lyn Gardner commended for its “endless invention, technical wizardry and restless energy”, while also pointing out that it lacked some crucial human element. This chilliness that she identified was not the case however with "The Encounter", the exhilarating 2016 show inspired by Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming, about the experiences of an American photographer in the Brazilian rainforest. Conceived and performed by McBurney, this extraordinary performance used binaural technology to envelope and sonically transport the audience.
The disruptive energy of the text feels very welcome at a time when there has been a worrying increase in the number of people arrested and imprisoned for environmental activism
"Drive Your Plow" will star the acclaimed actor Kathryn Hunter – recently seen on stage as King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe and on screen as all three witches in Joel Coen’s film "The Tragedy of Macbeth", and famed for her shapeshifting physicality – as Janina. Hunter withdrew from the production for a time as her husband, McBurney’s friend and the company’s co-founder, sadly passed away last year, but later re-joined the production.
The Complicité show is a co-production between the Barbican Centre in the UK and a number of UK and international partners including the Theatre de la Ville de Luxembourg and L’Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris – which means it has the financial resources to potentially create something truly spectacular. McBurney has been shaping the show for some time and it started touring in December last year, before officially opening at the Barbican this month. After its London run, it will play further UK and European dates.
It’s easy to see what drew McBurney to the book and how Tokarczuk’s rich, spirited prose and anarchic sensibility would make a good fit with his questing imagination. Thematically, the concerns of this 2009 novel—with environmental unbalance and humanity’s place in the natural world—feel more resonant now than ever and the disruptive energy of the text feels very welcome at a time when there has been a worrying increase in the number of people arrested and imprisoned for environmental activism.
When Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of the novel, Spoor, was released in 2017, one Polish journalist labelled the film “deeply anti-Christian” and said it promoted eco-terrorism. Holland, in an interview with the Guardian, responded that “we read this with some satisfaction and we are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters, because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it”.
Awards and accolades are one thing, but hopefully Complicité’s production will enable new audiences to connect with Tokarczuk’s work – and her political message.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is at the Barbican Theatre, London, from 15th March to 1st April and then touring.
