Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead

The international touring company Complicité presents a new work for the theatre, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, directed by Simon McBurney.

Based on Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name, the darkly comic, anarchic noir caused a seismic reaction in Tokarczuk’s native Poland due to its defiant attack on authoritarian structures, with right-wing press branding the writer an ‘eco-terrorist’ and national traitor.

The story unfolds through the eyes of 65 year-old local woman, Janina – itself a radical act in a society which seeks to render older women invisible. Janina is engaged in fierce resistance against the injustices around her, and refuses to be a prisoner of society and gender. Her actions ask questions both of the male world which surrounds her and of our deeper human intentions. What does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be animal, and can we separate the two? Why is the killing of animals sport and that of humans murder?

Drive Your Plow’s story begins 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 65 year-old local woman, ex-engineer, environmentalist, amateur astronomer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake – has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the community shares their isolated, rural home, and she believes they are acting strangely…

A thought-provoking, wry and other worldly murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a love letter to the natural world and the poetry of Blake. It is also a scathing reproach of toxic masculinity, the treatment of the marginalised, and the hypocrisy of institutional power.

Thu 19 Jan
7:30pm

Fri 20 Jan
7:30pm

Sat 21 Jan
7:30pm

Mon 23 Jan
7:30pm

Tue 24 Jan
7:30pm

Wed 25 Jan
7:30pm

Thu 26 Jan
2:30pm

Thu 26 Jan
7:30pm

Fri 27 Jan
7:30pm

Sat 28 Jan
2:30pm

Sat 28 Jan
7:30pm

Mon 30 Jan
7:30pm

Tue 31 Jan
7:30pm

Wed 1 Feb
7:30pm

Thu 2 Feb
2:30pm

Thu 2 Feb
7:30pm

Fri 3 Feb
7:30pm

Sat 4 Feb
2:30pm

Sat 4 Feb
7:30pm

Mon 6 Feb
7:30pm

Tue 7 Feb
7:30pm

Wed 8 Feb
7:30pm

Thu 9 Feb
2:30pm

Thu

Bristol Old Vic King Street BS1 4ED

Thu 19 Jan 2023

This is a Past Event and has been archived.

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Website: bristololdvic.org.uk/

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