Award-winning, worldwide touring firm Complicité (The Encounter, Can I Live?) has introduced the complete casting for the world premiere of a brand new work for the theatre Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, conceived and directed by their Artistic Director and Co-Founder Simon McBurney. The piece relies on Nobel Prize-Winner Olga Tokarczuk’s genre-defying novel of the identical title.
The ensemble solid options lengthy standing Complicité collaborators, alongside new performers working with the corporate for the very first time. Kathryn Hunter will play Janina Duszejko – a former engineer, environmentalist, devoted astrologer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake. She is joined by Thomas Arnold, Johannes Flaschberger, Amanda Hadingue, Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer, Weronika Maria, Tim McMullan, César Sarachu, Sophie Steer and Alexander Uzoka. Casting is topic to vary at some venues.
Simon McBurney:
“Olga Tokarczuk’s savage, funny and madly beautiful “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is being dropped at the stage by Complicité with a multi-national ensemble made up of long-term collaborators comparable to César Sarachu (Street of Crocodiles, Master and Margarita), Tim McMullan (Lucie Cabrol, Mnemonic, Master and Margarita), Johannes Flaschberger (Lucie Cabrol, Foe, Mnemonic, Measure for Measure and Master and Margarita) and a brand new technology of outstanding actors. We are significantly thrilled and delighted to announce that main the corporate, within the function of protagonist Janina, is Kathryn Hunter.
But we can’t, nor would we wish to, keep away from declaring that we’re additionally making this piece in a time of deep mourning. Following the demise of my comrade, compagnero and brother in arms Marcello Magni – co-founder of Complicité and Kathryn’s beloved husband – Kathryn and I really feel it’s a profound, stunning and therapeutic act to return collectively to create a bit of theatre impressed by this witty, poignant and ferocious work.”
Regarded as an eccentric outsider, the story unfolds by way of Janina’s eyes, veering between the comedic and macabre. Her actions query the patriarchal world which surrounds her, our deeper human intentions and the worth positioned on the lives of animals in distinction to our personal.
Tokarczuk’s novel triggered a seismic response in her native Poland on account of its defiant assault on authoritarian buildings, with right-wing press branding the author an ‘eco-terrorist’ and nationwide traitor. This playful, anarchic noir was translated into English in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is the primary English language stage adaptation of the novel and the primary time Tokarczuk’s work has been tailored for the UK stage.
The story begins within the depths of winter in a small group on a distant mountainside, as males from the native searching membership start to die in mysterious circumstances. Janina Duszejko has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the group shares their remoted, rural dwelling, and she or he believes they’re performing surprisingly…
A philosophical and poetic homicide thriller, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a rallying cry for nature and a love-letter to the poetry of Blake. At its coronary heart it’s a playful and profound work that asks us to think about what it means to dwell in concord with the world round us, our place within the ecosystem, and the perilous penalties all of us face if our connection to the pure world is misplaced.
Collaborating with McBurney on the challenge are set and costume designer Rae Smith, lighting designer Paule Constable, sound designer Christopher Shutt, video designer Dick Straker, dramaturgs Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook and Kirsty Housley gives extra course. Completing the inventive group are design assistant William Fricker, lighting affiliate Lucia Sanchez and sound affiliate Ella Walhstrӧm.
Supported by a pan-European community of co-producers, the manufacturing begins at Theatre Royal Plymouth (1-3 December 2022) adopted by a 3-week run at Bristol Old Vic (19 Jan – 11 Feb), dates at Oxford Playhouse (1-4 March) forward of a nationwide opening – 20 March – on the Barbican, London (15 March – 1 April). The manufacturing will then tour all through 2023 with additional UK dates at Nottingham Playhouse (4-8 April), Belgrade Theatre Coventry (19-22 April) and The Lowry (25-29 April) earlier than worldwide dates in May and June 2023 together with Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, and L’Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris. Tour dates in England at the moment are on sale (http://www.complicite.org/).