Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead - Complicité

I loved this novel when Fitzcarraldo (a fantastic publishing house) released the English version in 2018. And the film version Spoor/Pokot (directed by Agnieszka Holland) was genuinely weird. I am excited to see what Complicite does with it.

There is a thread for this already. Could a mod combine?   A quick check suggests the original (mine!) has Plow not Plough - which for some reason is the title of the book in translation and the Barbican show.  A further check indicates William Blake used plow not plough, interestingly.

 

I did search before posting
, honestly

This looks to be selling really well. Just nabbed a £45 front row for one of the matinees. Everything else seems back of the gods or restricted views.

Saw yesterday's matinee at the Barbican, and very much enjoyed it, especially Kathryn Hunter's unforgettable central performance.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I gather from the posts above that this is based on a novel, and that there has been a film made of it. I haven't read the book nor seen the film.

A hunter has been murdered, and Kathryn Hunter's Janina, a William Blake aficionado and animal rights activist, suspects the animals might be taking revenge. More murders follow. . .

As a detective genre piece, this doesn't work. Agatha Christie this isn't. Noone (except the protagonist lol) has a motive, and consequently there are no suspects for the audience to puzzle over.

If the protagonist is right, and this is Hitchcock's "The Birds," where nature turns against us, then the piece eschews the thriller genre just as much as the detective genre, as the killings are presented as a fait accompli, and potential murder victims are unsympathetic and unperturbed, rather than experiencing the perpetual fear, and panicked reactions to fear, that were Hitchcock's raison d'etre.

If there were potential suspects and potential victims, the staging doesn't want us to see them, as Kathryn Hunter's protagonist is spotlit on a dark stage, and everybody else creeps about in crepuscular darkness.

Even when characters do join Hunter in her central spotlight, we see them through her eyes, hear about them through her monologues, know them by the nicknames she gives them.

So what the show is mostly about is perspective. Hunter's furious sardonic raspy hysterical alienated we-are-animals-and-animals-are-us perspective and the perspective of everyone else.

Only Tim McMullan has a stage voice (literal and metaphorical) as distinctive, in its own way, as Hunter's, so he makes the perfect status quo final-boss type character, as the Priest who asserts man's primacy over nature: God put animals there for humans to kill and wear and eat. McMullan's smug singsong cadences go to war with Hunter's propulsive prodding sardonic and salient rasp.

William Blake, whose poems periodically are presented as surtitles, hangs over the production, mystifying it up. Blake, of course, saw the divine in animals, in the tiger burning bright, in the lamb, even in the rabbit. He saw perspective as everything, finding his own unique perspective, and magnifying it to the nth degree. His poems give mighty weight to Hunter's animal-positive perspective.

But while Blake, the lighting designer's spotlight, the writer's monologues, and Hunter's own fierce, lithe and witty performance give immense weight to Janina's perspective, everybody of any consequence on stage ignores her: she is simply too small, too female, too old, too out-of-kilter to bother them: she is everything they don't even deign to see. And this is the source of so much humour in the production, that something so raging and powerful can be so invisible to so many smug patriarchal types.

As a play about whether meat is murder, the play doesn't really succeed. It so obviously biased, with it's magnification of Janina's perspective (even resorting to shock tactic projected imagery of the sort you'd see in animal rights pamphlets).

Janina's animal-loving perspective is never tested by, for example, asking her how much she loves the carnivorous side of cats, or indeed, whether she acknowledges the carnivorous canines of humans, or how very hard it is to live on a balanced diet with no animal products, or how producing protein rich soy products can result in tyrants hacking down rainforests. McMullan's smug assertion of human dominion is far too facile a target for Janina to critique.

What the production really does succeed in is showing us how people live in their own constructed worlds, how these worlds can clash, and how simultaneously funny and tragic that can be.

3 and a half stars from me, for the eye-opening commentary on perspectives and for Hunter's tour-de-force, which would have been higher if genre pleasures had also been catered to.

Press night cancelled this evening 45 mins after it was due to start due to Kathryn Hunter being unwell.

Last night's press night cancelled due to illness. Such a shame.

Amanda Hadingue did a fantastic job when I saw her in Oxford. Not once did I question her age or height. Indeed she was utterly convincing as someone who was almost invisible to the people around her by the nature of her age and ordinariness.

I think that is why I was glad not to have seen Kathryn Hunter who, I would imagine, would have given a far more present interpretation that would have made it far harder to view her as someone to easily overlook.

As a piece, I agree it needs tightening to command the stage for no longer than 2.5 hours.

I really liked this. It was my first Complicite play and I loved how inventive and visually exciting it was compared to a lot of theatre I see.

I'm vegetarian so maybe I felt less browbeaten, but I took the theme to be more about how humans have become divorced from nature than 'meat is murder.’

I was surprised by how funny it was and I liked the quirkiness and irony in the narration (it was Kathryn Hunter when I saw it).

A few people near me didn’t return after the interval. It felt too long, and the Barbican doesn't help with a 7.45pm start time - it was hard to stay focussed.

Yup

Thank you!  I guess I will make sure to visit the "trough" before the show and at interval.

Yes, if anyone is seeing this today could you please report if Hunter is back.

Such a shame as the run ends this week.

Unless you are the most ardent Hunter fan, I think you will not be disappointed by the replacement.

Whilst I have issues with the piece, that was nothing to do with the central performance

MJH beat me to two of the things I was going to comment about today's matinee.

Kathryn Hunter was on auto-prompter and reading her lines pretty much throughout. Very distracting and very noticeable from the front row. She also seemed exhausted by the end, a long supportive cast hug/grouping in the wings just visible as I was leaving.

I kinda liked it, I liked more of the staging than the script. It felt too long and I found myself way more interested in the stylisation and the visuals. A big standing O at the end but.. yeah, really not so sure why to be honest.