When Olga Tokarczuk published Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in 2009 in her native Poland, she was accused of inciting eco-terrorism – remarkable for any novel, let alone the tale of a 60-something English teacher recounting a string of murders in her village. All the victims are hunters, and Mrs Duszejko insists the local animals are enacting summary justice; unsurprisingly, most of the village thinks she’s mad.
But Tokarczuk’s book is radical. It proposes a way of thinking about animals that, when taken to its logical conclusion, explodes the world as we know it. It’s transgressive in more subtle ways, too. Mrs Duszejko is the kind of protagonist we rarely see: a 60-something woman who is smart, rebellious, eccentric, angry – and effective.
This alone makes it a brilliant choice for theatre, with its massive audience of women in this demographic. And in Belvoir’s adaptation of Tokarczuk’s novel, written and directed by artistic director Eamon Flack, Pamela Rabe is a brilliant Mrs Duszejko, mixing deadpan humour with deep feeling, social discomfort and a touch of the ridiculous.
Rabe leads a supremely entertaining production that is funny, engrossing, visually gorgeous and playful, with Flack’s lo-fi “theatre as make-believe” aesthetic in full force as actors create snow blizzards from confetti and fans, and rain squalls from spray bottles. Miraculously, the show’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime never feels overly long.
Flack’s adaptation is remarkably faithful, condensing the novel’s action but keeping the key events and chronology, lifting Tokarczuk’s sublimely droll narration and dialogue seemingly word for word.
The creative team and ensemble of 11 actors also beautifully recreate the distinctive milieu of the novel: a remote plateau in Poland, populated by a mix of societal drop-outs from the cities and locals who have been hardened by the region’s harsh weather, impoverishment and history of violence. Mrs Duszejko is the former, and so are the members of the chosen-family that accretes around her over the course of the story: her taciturn but sensitive neighbour Oddball (Arky Michael, doubling the role with Bruce Spence through the season); her former student turned fellow William Blake obsessive Dizzy (Daniel R Nixon); and local thrift shop assistant Good News (Emma Diaz).
Many of the actors also double as animals and the decision to play them straight – dressed as humans – is smart, amplifying the novel’s post-humanist manifesto. Having these actors-as-animals watch from the sidelines is also a nice touch, though it would be more effective if consistent.
Something is missing, however: the radical, angry heart of Tokarczuk’s novel and its sense of grief and horror. This is a murder mystery where the deaths are gruesome and disturbing – and need to be, to mirror the cruelty of how the story’s animals are killed; the final reveal of who committed the murders and why feels like a kick in the guts. In this production, each death is delivered as light comedy and you never get the satisfaction of feeling the motivation behind them.
It’s a shame, because the most radical and interesting aspect of Tokarczuk’s novel is its proposal that rage is a clarifying and positive force. It’s also the thing that makes it feel most urgent for our time: the author is, on one hand, testing a thesis for how we might individually deal with authoritarianism, patriarchy and eco-crisis; and on the other, validating the discombobulation and distress of living in a world where what is moral and what is law are so divorced.
Losing the novel’s deeply felt sense of rage and horror and grief also undercuts the sense of dramatic tension and catharsis. The final reveal feels weirdly muted, passing too quickly and calmly on stage and eliciting no discernible reaction from the audience. It’s compounded by the decision to cut a crucial scene late in the novel, involving a sermon on the merits of hunting, which is one of the book’s crucial cogs (and best moments).
There’s a sense in the final act that Flack is rushing to wrap up – just when he should be giving each scene space to breathe so that it fully lands with the audience. The play feels slightly messy and unresolved in other ways, too. In general, the ensemble feels underutilised, and sequences where they come together (particularly choreographic scenes) are so satisfying and effective that you wonder why there aren’t more. In particular, Paula Arundell and Nadie Kammallaweera feel wasted.
Flack makes a very particular style of theatre and there are moments where he captures the weird mania of the text – a dress-up dance party of mushroom pickers; a flock of fieldfares dispatching magpie foes via defecation. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that what he wants to do as a director and what Tokarczuk’s text demands just don’t quite mesh.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is on at Belvoir St Theatre until 10 May
