Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead - Complicité

[bordeaux]

Simon McBurney is directing an adaptation of the Olga Tokarczuk novel in English next year.  It's on in Paris, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Barbican and the Lowry, the Theatre Royal, Plymouth and the Bristol Old Vic (or at least they are co-producers).  Very exciting news.  

www.theatre-odeon.eu/fr/saison-2022-2023/spectacles-22-23/drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead 


theatres.lu/fr/node/364 

[bordeaux]

Some dates: The production will open in December at Theatre Royal Plymouth (1 to 3 December 2022) ahead of a three-week run at the Bristol Old Vic (19 January to 11 February 2023).

It will then tour throughout 2023 with UK dates at Oxford Playhouse (1 to 4 March), the Barbican (15 March to 1 April), Nottingham Playhouse (4 to 8 April), Belgrade Theatre Coventry (18 to 22 April) and The Lowry (25 to 29 April) before international dates in May and June 2023 including Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Theatre Amsterdam and L'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Paris.

And more details:
www.whatsonstage.com/bristol-theatre/news/complicite-drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead_56916.html

[jek]

I loved this novel when Fitzcarraldo (a fantastic publishing house) released the English version in 2018. And the film version Spoor/Pokot (directed by Agnieszka Holland) was genuinely weird. I am excited to see what Complicite does with it.

[Someone in a tree]

Touring from Dec 2022.

Barbican booking opened this morning

[bordeaux]

There is a thread for this already. Could a mod combine?   A quick check suggests the original (mine!) has Plow not Plough - which for some reason is the title of the book in translation and the Barbican show.  A further check indicates William Blake used plow not plough, interestingly.

 

[TallPaul]

Threads merged. (It took a while because I couldn't find the original!)

[Someone in a tree]

I did search before posting
, honestly

[bordeaux]

This is long (3 hours) and dark, relieved by some humour, though perhaps not enough, and you may feel you are being constantly harangued: the message that meat is murder is driven home again and again. In Bristol Kathryn Hunter doesn't seem to be playing the role (no explanation is given) and Janina was played by Amanda Hadingue, whose autocue could occasionally be seen on the back screen. Very impressive as a stand-in at short notice, though I wonder if Hunter might have brought more charm to the role. I'm a long-time Complicité fan but this strikes me as one of their lesser efforts (as did the last one about film producer, Robert Evans). There is a mike front centre which Janina uses to narrate the story, breaking off to act some of the scenes she is describing. The usual talented line-up of actors playing multiple roles, some interesting movement (though not enough for me - I could have done with more of the animals), use of screens at the back, strong eastern European feel, as you would expect. Three stars.

[Dave B]

This looks to be selling really well. Just nabbed a £45 front row for one of the matinees. Everything else seems back of the gods or restricted views.

[oxfordsimon]

Just back from a sold out Oxford Playhouse

Really uncertain as to my reaction

First impression is that I am glad not to have seen Kathryn Hunter as she would have been too present rather than playing someone more anonymous

Second I think it can stand to lose 20 to 30 minutes. It is too drawn out.

There is much to admire. But my attention did wander

[Steve]

Saw yesterday's matinee at the Barbican, and very much enjoyed it, especially Kathryn Hunter's unforgettable central performance.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I gather from the posts above that this is based on a novel, and that there has been a film made of it. I haven't read the book nor seen the film.

A hunter has been murdered, and Kathryn Hunter's Janina, a William Blake aficionado and animal rights activist, suspects the animals might be taking revenge. More murders follow. . .

As a detective genre piece, this doesn't work. Agatha Christie this isn't. Noone (except the protagonist lol) has a motive, and consequently there are no suspects for the audience to puzzle over.

If the protagonist is right, and this is Hitchcock's "The Birds," where nature turns against us, then the piece eschews the thriller genre just as much as the detective genre, as the killings are presented as a fait accompli, and potential murder victims are unsympathetic and unperturbed, rather than experiencing the perpetual fear, and panicked reactions to fear, that were Hitchcock's raison d'etre.

If there were potential suspects and potential victims, the staging doesn't want us to see them, as Kathryn Hunter's protagonist is spotlit on a dark stage, and everybody else creeps about in crepuscular darkness.

Even when characters do join Hunter in her central spotlight, we see them through her eyes, hear about them through her monologues, know them by the nicknames she gives them.

So what the show is mostly about is perspective. Hunter's furious sardonic raspy hysterical alienated we-are-animals-and-animals-are-us perspective and the perspective of everyone else.

Only Tim McMullan has a stage voice (literal and metaphorical) as distinctive, in its own way, as Hunter's, so he makes the perfect status quo final-boss type character, as the Priest who asserts man's primacy over nature: God put animals there for humans to kill and wear and eat. McMullan's smug singsong cadences go to war with Hunter's propulsive prodding sardonic and salient rasp.

William Blake, whose poems periodically are presented as surtitles, hangs over the production, mystifying it up. Blake, of course, saw the divine in animals, in the tiger burning bright, in the lamb, even in the rabbit. He saw perspective as everything, finding his own unique perspective, and magnifying it to the nth degree. His poems give mighty weight to Hunter's animal-positive perspective.

But while Blake, the lighting designer's spotlight, the writer's monologues, and Hunter's own fierce, lithe and witty performance give immense weight to Janina's perspective, everybody of any consequence on stage ignores her: she is simply too small, too female, too old, too out-of-kilter to bother them: she is everything they don't even deign to see. And this is the source of so much humour in the production, that something so raging and powerful can be so invisible to so many smug patriarchal types.

As a play about whether meat is murder, the play doesn't really succeed. It so obviously biased, with it's magnification of Janina's perspective (even resorting to shock tactic projected imagery of the sort you'd see in animal rights pamphlets).

Janina's animal-loving perspective is never tested by, for example, asking her how much she loves the carnivorous side of cats, or indeed, whether she acknowledges the carnivorous canines of humans, or how very hard it is to live on a balanced diet with no animal products, or how producing protein rich soy products can result in tyrants hacking down rainforests. McMullan's smug assertion of human dominion is far too facile a target for Janina to critique.

What the production really does succeed in is showing us how people live in their own constructed worlds, how these worlds can clash, and how simultaneously funny and tragic that can be.

3 and a half stars from me, for the eye-opening commentary on perspectives and for Hunter's tour-de-force, which would have been higher if genre pleasures had also been catered to.

[harry]

Mar 19, 2023 8:53:32 GMT Steve said:

Saw yesterday's matinee at the Barbican, and very much enjoyed it, especially Kathryn Hunter's unforgettable central performance.

Thanks for the detailed review Steve - I have read the book and v interested to see this.

Can I ask a boring practical question - the Barbican site mentions gunshots and I’m a terrible nervous jumper! Are there lots? Do you get warning (I.e.someone waving a gun anbout onstage first) or are they out of the blue? Any details appreciated - forewarned is forearmed etc..

[drmaplewood]

Press night cancelled this evening 45 mins after it was due to start due to Kathryn Hunter being unwell.

[Steve]

Mar 19, 2023 18:57:53 GMT harry said:

Mar 19, 2023 8:53:32 GMT Steve said:

Saw yesterday's matinee at the Barbican, and very much enjoyed it, especially Kathryn Hunter's unforgettable central performance.

Thanks for the detailed review Steve - I have read the book and v interested to see this.

Can I ask a boring practical question - the Barbican site mentions gunshots and I’m a terrible nervous jumper! Are there lots? Do you get warning (I.e.someone waving a gun anbout onstage first) or are they out of the blue? Any details appreciated - forewarned is forearmed etc..

I flinched when there were gunshots, but I knew they were coming.

[lonlad]

Last night's press night cancelled due to illness. Such a shame.

[MrBunbury]

I saw it last night. I was a bit disappointed I did not see Kathryn Hunter in the lead role because I think she would have brought a different quirkiness and credibility to the role (Amanda Hadingue was good, but she did not look like a 65-year old woman and is rather tall, which undermines a bit the fact that Janina is overlooked by all the men around her). I have not read the book or seen the movie so I cannot compare the play to anything, but I found it a bit slow (three hours is a long time after a full day of work) and I did not feel particularly engaged despite I liked the theme. Olga Tokarczuk was in the audience.

[oxfordsimon]

Amanda Hadingue did a fantastic job when I saw her in Oxford. Not once did I question her age or height. Indeed she was utterly convincing as someone who was almost invisible to the people around her by the nature of her age and ordinariness.

I think that is why I was glad not to have seen Kathryn Hunter who, I would imagine, would have given a far more present interpretation that would have made it far harder to view her as someone to easily overlook.

As a piece, I agree it needs tightening to command the stage for no longer than 2.5 hours.

[Someone in a tree]

Well its long and repetitive.

Does someone reading huge chunks of the novel count as an adaption?

Everything was also so literal. Projections and sounds effects just dont encourage you to use your imagination and that I really don't like in the theatre.

Thumbs down from me and my friends (some left in the interval). Hey hum.

[kate8]

I really liked this. It was my first Complicite play and I loved how inventive and visually exciting it was compared to a lot of theatre I see.

I'm vegetarian so maybe I felt less browbeaten, but I took the theme to be more about how humans have become divorced from nature than 'meat is murder.’

I was surprised by how funny it was and I liked the quirkiness and irony in the narration (it was Kathryn Hunter when I saw it).

A few people near me didn’t return after the interval. It felt too long, and the Barbican doesn't help with a 7.45pm start time - it was hard to stay focussed.

[theatrefan2018]

Mar 23, 2023 18:48:54 GMT kate8 said:

A few people near me didn’t return after the interval. It felt too long, and the Barbican doesn't help with a 7.45pm start time - it was hard to stay focussed.

So is it still around 3 hours, as reported earlier for the Bristol run?

[Someone in a tree]

Mar 24, 2023 7:08:50 GMT theatrefan2018 said:

Mar 23, 2023 18:48:54 GMT kate8 said:

A few people near me didn’t return after the interval. It felt too long, and the Barbican doesn't help with a 7.45pm start time - it was hard to stay focussed.

So is it still around 3 hours, as reported earlier for the Bristol run?

Yup

[barelyathletic]

Saw this last week. I was never bored, though it is about 45 minutes too long and repeats its point too many times. However, even if it's not a great play it's a pretty good piece of storytelling if that's what you want. Katherine Hunter is a compelling narrator and, with so much prose, it's hardly surprising she uses four autocues. It's subtly enough done that I'd guess 50% of the audience didn't realise she was reading it, hence the massive standing ovation. But as a stage adaptation - and very oddly for Complicite - it just doesn't seem terribly imaginative or thrilling. If I'd read the novel I'd have probably really enjoyed it as a book. As a stage play it's just okay. Not bad but nothing to write home about either. Which is not what I'd expect from this company. Three stars.

[theatrefan2018]

Mar 24, 2023 9:16:36 GMT Someone in a tree said:

Mar 24, 2023 7:08:50 GMT theatrefan2018 said:

So is it still around 3 hours, as reported earlier for the Bristol run?

Yup

Thank you!  I guess I will make sure to visit the "trough" before the show and at interval.

[mjh]

Does anyone know if Kathryn Hunter is expected to return to this?

[jaggy]

Yes, if anyone is seeing this today could you please report if Hunter is back.

Such a shame as the run ends this week.