”Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” review – Complicité makes nature murderous

There are two kinds of people – those who have read Olga Tokarczuk’s award-winning Polish novel with a lengthy yet intriguing title, and those who haven’t.

For the former, experiencing this 165-minute stage adaptation can be an intriguing exercise in watching a world-renowned company take an extremely wordy book and bring it to the stage with relatively decent results. For the latter, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead will likely be a philosophical murder mystery with twists, turns and deep dives into the worlds of astrology, animal rights and environmental awareness.

Plot-wise, Tokarczuk’s text is a pretty by-the-numbers thriller – a group of senior figures in a rural Polish town are dying in unusually similar circumstances, while the reclusive eccentric central protagonist, Janina, has a theory that the true suspects are the animals that the men have been hunting recreationally. As the body count rises and the animals are behaving increasingly erratically, it’s left to Janina to try and convince her community that the furry foxes and endearing deer might be a bit more maniacal than they let on.

The show, directed by Complicité’s artistic director Simon McBurney, feels like a sibling to 2015’s The Encounter – which also took the building blocks of a novel to scrutinise, with artistic ferocity, the way in which humanity interacts with the natural world – and the ways in which the natural world in turn might reciprocate.

After the piece’s lead Kathryn Hunter was taken ill last week, it was left to the formidable Amanda Hadingue to play Janina with endearing belligerence, guiding us through this tale of intrigue by talking into a microphone at the centre of the stage.

But where Tokarczuk imbues Janina with an immense flights of whimsical fancy – giving her elaborately lengthy, lyrical tangents – on stage the words feel fleeter and less lofty – more of a perambulating stream of cracked consciousness. It makes the experience more meek: less disarming than it reads on the page. This means the whodunnit aspect of the show loses its momentum, and the work done by McBurney, the company and dramaturgs Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook feels overly deferential to the novel rather than confidently adapted for live consumption.

What keeps things ticking along nicely is the adept company of multi-roling performers inhabiting roles around Janina, often bathed in Paule Constable’s half light around Hadingue’s spot-lit Janina. Tim McMullan is stellar in a variety of ill-fated roles, while Sophie Stone continues to be a rising star presence with a lofty monologue from a paranoid politician’s wife. Dick Straker’s videos feel like they’ve been taken directly from one of the Barbican’s gallery spaces – simultaneously cosmological and enthralling.

There are some juicy nods to the way in which Christianity, by asserting that God made man in his image, almost cements a carnivorous way of life. Janina, whose body is wracked with medical ailments, often acts as a walking paradox – committed to supporting the natural world but unable to stand in broad daylight.

But these are occasionally touched upon in a staging that craves the same sort of intimacy that Tokarczuk puts into the novel. Part of me wonders if the show could have achieved more if it had Hadingue, talking into a microphone for lots of the show, chat directly to audience members through headphones in a similar vein to The Encounter.

One caveat – of the two camps mentioned above, it is worth admitting that I belong to those who know what’s coming – the rug pull that makes the novel so impressive. Which is a bit of a shame – I expect the show will perhaps be more enticing for those who don’t know its carefully guarded secrets.