Drive Your Plow onstage
Streaming: An adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
London-based theatre company Complicité is staging an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a novel the New York Times has called a “marvelously weird and fablelike mystery.”
The novel mixes rural crime fiction, William Blake’s writings, and astrology to create one of the most original, challenging, engaging stories I’ve read in years. I can only imagine what this will look like on stage.
I heard about this production on my Saturday walk through the neighborhood, a stroll which usually takes 45 minutes, but was somehow extended to nearly two hours as I stopped every so often to chat with neighbors who were mulching their flowerbeds.
Boyd Tonkin, on the Times Literary Supplement’s podcast, applauded the staging of the work.
If you’ve read the book, you know it’s a heavy, voice-driven first-person account of what starts as a murder mystery in rural Poland.
As the theatre company itself explains the story:
In the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside near the Czech-Polish border, men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko – an eccentric older local woman, ex-engineer, environmentalist, devoted astrologer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake – has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the community share their isolated, rural home, and she believes they are acting strangely…
The show has been bouncing around England since the end of last year and will tour Europe starting next month. Thankfully, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead will be available as a live streaming performance for a few dates at the end of April.
I’m looking forward to closing the curtains, kicking back on my couch, and being transported to rural Poland for a “marvelously weird” story next weekend.
Complicité and Bristol Old Vic On Screen in association with MyWorld present
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead