Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Bristol Old Vic – ‘A masterful, boundary-blurring call to activism’

What would animals say if they could speak? “They have no voice in parliament,” laments Janina Duszejko (Kathryn Hunter), the fearless and funny protagonist with a fierce devotion to the environment and a passion for the early romantic era poetry of William Blake.

Blake was fascinated by the beauty and fragility of nature, and the coexistence of light and dark; good and evil.

Adapted from the English translation of the mysterious ecological whodunnit novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, the new Complicité production at Bristol Old Vic, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is peppered with the poet’s words.

Kathryn Hunter as Janina Duszejko in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Complicité, Bristol Old Vic (2022) – photo: Camilla Adams

Sometimes they are projected onto the backcloth, and then they are pored over, spoken aloud and repeated by Janina, who, like Blake, is utterly preoccupied with the ways in which humanity and morality are aligned, or otherwise fractured.

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument, she recites his words: “Once meek, and in a perilous path, / The just man kept his course along / The Vale of Death”.

Janina admits to being someone who does not believe in perpetual light. “I prefer dusk,” she reflects. Thus the central question of what it is that allows us as a society to judge animals and humans so differently is an anathema to her.

A self-styled “solitary she wolf”, she does not, and cannot, differentiate between them, calling her dead dogs her “little girls” whose death sent her into the blackest despair. And on seeing a group of mask-clad children preparing to put on a show, she talks of seeing them as a new species, “half human, half animal”.

This is a story in which Janina becomes convinced that the animals of the plateau on which she lives – killed in great numbers by hunters from the safety of their towers – must seize the agenda, and exact their vengeance.

It might seem to her rural community like the furious screaming into the abyss of one isolated “mad old biddy”, but Janina uses her perceived invisibility as “a tool” to act in the name of others, albeit, she reflects, not entirely consciously.

It is as if she is possessed by “the vast underground nerves under the earth” – interestingly, in his programme notes, Complicité artistic director Simon McBurney cites mycelium as a recurrent image arising in the rehearsal process.

But as the local catholic priest repeatedly professes, “animals have no soul”, and will therefore get no salvation.

Tokarczuk’s novel was written in 2009, nine years before Antonia Lloyd-Jones translated it into English. In the intervening years, the climate emergency has deepened, and become ever more fixed in the public consciousness – just as the movement towards veganism as a key means of helping to tackle the crisis has gained momentum.

McBurney ends his programme biography by urging the audience to support the international Stop Ecocide campaign. And Amber Massie-Blomfield, executive director of Complicité, writes: “Witnessing Janina’s story, we might think of ourselves not simply as an audience, but a solidarity. Imagine the power in that.”

Certainly, the production is an explosive unravelling of the hypocrisy of societal norms, and the idea of action being moral, even when it is ‘lawful’; asking why the killing of animals is deemed sport, while that of humans is murder.

Janina is a huge unbounded presence, displaying a strength of mind and body belied by her bird-like frame. In fact, she is dominated in stature by the entire ensemble, who tower over her in their black hooded coats, like the slow encroachment of death.

And Hunter is masterful in the role – delivering Joycian cadences in her deliciously gravelly timbre, she’s a thrilling presence. It’s also worth saying that it is an all too rare and unmitigated pleasure to see a woman in her mid 60s taking centre stage.

Spot-lit and at the microphone for much of the play, the effect is to place the audience inside her internal monologue, giving us the onus to act in our own lives.

Added to which, a reflective backdrop literally forces us to hold a mirror up to ourselves (and a little distractingly, the autocue, too), and the double standards within which we seem content to exist.

Complicité productions are renowned for their virtuoso creative collaboration, and the staging is nothing short of sensational here. The interplay between Paule Constable’s lighting, with its monochromatic spots, strobes and sudden flushes of colour, Rae Smith’s deceptively simple set and elegant costume design, and Dick Straker’s gorgeous projections – from fire to forests, maps to ghosts, and birds in flight to the cosmos – is exceptional. It’s a seamless blurring of boundaries that is apposite for a narrative emphasising the interconnectedness of us all.

The ensemble, who often have their black-coated backs to the audience, themselves become part of the world from which Janina stands out in stark relief, aware of the urgency that propels her forward.

The cast are universally strong, through since it is entirely Janina’s voice and vision through which we experience the story, the characters we meet along the way are necessarily caricatures, known only by the names she has given them: Bigfoot, Oddball, Good News and the like.

It’s funny, too. Janina’s profound self-awareness and natural levity punctuates what might otherwise risk being too didactic. It will undoubtedly come across as a hymn to veganism to some, and conflates eating meat with killing animals for sport – but then again, many would say that the two are, and should be, considered one and the same.

There are elements – the Catholicism subplot amongst them – that do not translate so strongly, and, at three hours, it’s undeniably long. But there is beauty and depth that will sit with me for far longer.

Will it succeed in its goal of propelling its audience into activism? In its unique way, the narrative unfolds into an elegiac and menacing whodunnit that points the finger, ultimately, at all of us.

The closing line “we’ve got so much time” – made even more emotive in light of the recent death of Hunter’s husband and Complicité co-founder, Marcello Magni – is a neat distillation of the status quo which Janina has fought to change: a world characterised by human complacency, hypocrisy, inactivity and ignorance.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is at Bristol Old Vic from January 19-February 11 at 7.30pm, with additional 2.30pm matinee shows on Thursday and Saturday. Tickets are available at www.bristololdvic.org.uk.

The UK tour dates are on sale from www.complicite.org. Casting is subject to change for some performances and venues.

All photos: Camilla Adams

Read more: Complicité cast in rehearsals for three week run at Bristol Old Vic

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