After performances in Plymouth, Bristol, Oxford and London, the production goes to Nottingham (April 4-8), Coventry (April 19-22), Salford (April 25-29), Recklinghausen in Germany (May 3-6), Luxembourg (May 11-12), Budapest (May 16-17), Vienna (May 22-26), Amsterdam (June 1-2), and Paris (June 7-17).
The production is by the London-based internationally renowned touring company Complicité. It describes Tokarczuk’s novel as “a thought-provoking, wry and otherworldly murder mystery, a tale about the cosmos, poetry, and the limitations and possibilities of activism.”
On its website, the company outlines the plot of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead as follows: “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 – an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist and devoted astrologer – 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.”
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize.
The novel was made into a film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland. Entitled Spoor (a reference to the traces left behind by the hunted game), it won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017.
Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
(mk/gs)
