SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING SOMETHING SPECIAL
The title alone tells you something big is going to happen. And what a title. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. Novelist Olga Tokarczuk, whose story this adapts, is a Nobel Prize for Literature winner. A lot of oomph there already. And then some more. The play is by Complicité, legendary in their reputation and like other things of legend I’ve heard of them without witnessing them at first hand. The programme lists any number of partners – theatres in Britain, Switzerland, Iceland, Belgium and Germany. Strap yourselves in is the message – this is a big deal.
And thankfully, the play delivers exactly that. A story which spans forensic details of the criminal sort to the mythic movements of the stars. Between them, on a wooded mountainside, a small community of people by the Czech-Polish border, and animals that pay no heed to imaginary lines humans draw, whether in territory or conduct. Why would they, when those humans pay scant attention to boundaries they claim to live within, whether of social nicety, morality shaped by religion, or politics driven by favour?
All of this is experienced through the lens of what happens when members of the village’s hunting club are found dead. That at least is the narrative. It’s the scope of delivery which makes it stand out, the author’s microbe-to-macrocosm vision realised using sound and image and story in every form. It starts simply, the protagonist coming to a microphone stand and finding a post-it note with a William Blae quote attached. As she relates her tale, it’s brought to life in ways where performance is the core, supplemented expertly by lighting, music, projections, and design.
Different layers are interwoven. Personal stories of intimacy and fragility between individuals and in community unfold in relation to the impact hunters have on animals, and the ways creatures may be responding to their slaughter. The juggling of mythic and social and natural existence – projected quotes from Blake holding it all together – was at times a sensory overload. Particularly in the first half, when the flow could be relentless. Bright lights to signal transitions and layers of sounds didn’t always suit my double whammy of cataract and tinnitus, and the couple next to me didn’t return after the interval.
The second half draws things together to perfection. More measured, it weaves threads elegantly and with power, managing to convey both the very human stories of its characters and their social worlds, and the planet that allows them to exist. This is theatre of rare imagination and scope. Get along if you possibly can.
Drive your plow is showing at Nottingham Playhouse until Saturday 8th April, tickets available here nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/
Review by Adrian Reynolds
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