Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead premiered at BOV in Jan 2023, ahead of its national opening at The Barbican, London last week. It has already received rave reviews for its almighty and toweringly innovative adaptation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s murder mystery eco-noir novel.
Complicité's production is as an example of the way in which theatre can address the important issues of today. Complicité is a founding member of the Culture Declares Emergency initiative, and much of Artistic Director Simon McBurney’s (an active member of Stop Ecocide) work focuses on the state of our planet, and the art’s responsibility in encouraging activism.
Speaking about the original story of Drive Your Plow..., Simon McBurney said:
"Olga Tokarczuk has created an extraordinary world that speaks to my deepest sense of the continuity between humankind and nature – a world where 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.
It is a great privilege to bring to the stage what is surely one of literature’s most urgent accounts of being alive today."
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is the latest in a series of Complicité projects that urgently address the destruction of the planet. Figures In Extinction [1.0] which focused on humans’ disregard for animal life, is a collaboration with Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Nederlands Dans Theater. It recently won a prestigious Swan award, and will receive its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells in April 2023. Can I Live?, a film conceived, written and performed by Fehinti Balogun, was presented as part of the official programme for COP26, highlighting the social injustices caused and inflamed by climate change.
