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Co-Commissioned by The Lowry
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
The world-renowned 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 begins in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. Men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko – an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, devoted 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…
Engaged in fierce resistance against the injustices around her, Janina 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?
A thought-provoking, wry and otherworldly murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a tale about the cosmos, poetry, and the limitations and possibilities of activism.
“Olga Tokarczuk has created an extraordinary world that speaks to my deepest sense of the continuity between humankind and nature – a world where, like a mycelium web, all entities are connected deeply at the roots, unable to exist alone. Tokarczuk is a prophet for our times who understands us in all our hilarity, messiness, cruelty and animalism, and it is a great privilege to bring to the stage what is surely one of literature’s most urgent accounts of being alive today.” Complicité Artistic Director, Simon McBurney
“A new Complicite show isn’t just a devised play: it’s a theatrical event. At the company’s inimitable best, it is a ticket to another world.” Time Out
“one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created”
New York Times on Complicité’s award-winning production of The Encounter.
Additional information
Runtime
Approx 3 hours
Warnings
This production includes haze, simulated smoking and drug use, flashing lights, blackouts, jumpscares, loud noises (including gunshots), swearing, some nudity, depictions of death, blood and violence, and the staged mistreatment of animals.
Age Guidance 12+
School Rate available | To book tickets for your class, please call 0342 208 1850 or email groups@thelowry.com
Accessible Performances
Audio Described | Wednesday 26 April 2023 at 7.30pm | Touch Tour at 6pm
Captioned | Saturday 29 April 2023 at 2pm
Captioned (Polish) | Saturday 29 April 2023 at 7.30pm
To book accessible performances, please email access@thelowry.com or call 0161 876 2183
Aby zakupić bilety na przedstawienia z polskimi napisami, prosimy o email na adres access@thelowry.com lub telefon pod numer 0161 876 2183
In order to purchase tickets for performances with polish captions, please email access@thelowry.com or call 0161 876 2183
A Complicité co-production with
Barbican London, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Bristol Old Vic, Comédie de Genève, Holland Festival, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, L’Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, The Lowry, The National Theatre of Iceland, Oxford Playhouse, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
Adapted from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk
Directed by Simon McBurney
Set and Costume Design Rae Smith
Lighting Design Paule Constable
Sound Design Christopher Shutt
Video Design Dick Straker
Additional Direction Kirsty Housley
Dramaturgy by Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook
Movement Direction Toby Sedgwick
Original Compositions Richard Skelton
Original novel translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Artwork by Patryk Hardziej