Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead – Barbican, London

Based on the novel by Olga Tokarczuk

Director: Simon McBurney

Olga Tokarczuk’s best-selling novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead gets the Complicité treatment at the Barbican this week. With Kathryn Hunter taken ill on press night, Amanda Hadingue steps in to play teacher Janina, who suspects that deer are responsible for a series of murders in her Polish town. So capably does Hadingue inhabit Janina, it’s hard to imagine the play without her.

Hadingue leads a cast of 10 who play a variety of roles from corrupt policemen to the hunters that shoot rabbit, hare, pheasant and deer in the local countryside. One of these hunters is Big Foot who is discovered murdered – in bright tableau – at the play’s start. Janina is pleased he’s dead. He abused his dog, keeping it locked up in an outhouse during the winter where it howled with cold. Janina thinks that Big Foot may have something to do with the disappearance of her dogs, too. She discovers that Big Foot choked on a venison bone. She surmises that it’s the deer’s revenge.

But when other men begin to die, Janina suspects that the animals may be more directly involved in the grisly deaths. She’s aided in her investigation by her socially-awkward neighbour Oddball, her socially-awkward old student Dizzy and quiet Good News who runs a clothes shop in town, The four of them make up a family of misfits, a nucleus of resistance against the patriarchy embedded in the law, in politics and in the Catholic religion.

Complicité’s adaptation of Tokarczuk’s environmental thriller works best when it focuses on the thriller/horror side of the story and the dark shadowy aesthetics of Rae Smith’s set and Paule Constable’s light design make for an exciting and wry production. Only towards the end of the first half when Janina, Oddball and an entomologist smoke a joint – a scenario that is never funny but constantly overused in both theatre and film – does the tension untighten.

Hadingue is exceptionally charismatic as Janina, coming on stage wearing a mismatched tracksuit and clutching a plastic shopping bag. She narrates the story deftly, hardly moving at all in the opening 30 minutes or so. She’d make a good stand-up comedian, but she tells no shaggy dog story here despite its fantastical element. Janina’s story is about us all and how we navigate the world trapped between free will and fate. For Janina, her life is truly written in the stars and it’s a credit to Hadingue that we believe every word her character says.

The rest of the cast is just as accomplished and each actor brings their own kind of sinister to their roles. From the strange author who spends the summer in the town with her wife to the president’s wife who is taken to a psychiatric hospital to sort out her worries about the senseless slaughter of animals. It’s an approach that tries to honour the novel, which was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in 2019.

The Barbican hope that Kathryn Hunter will be well enough to perform at some shows before the run ends on Saturday and it will be interesting to see if she brings anything different to the lead role. Hadingue has saved the day, and we wish Hunter a speedy recovery.

Runs until 1 April 2023