A stage adaptation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is truly singular, and genuinely memorable
- Written by: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
Like all true visionaries, the English poet William Blake was light-years ahead of his time: a fierce critic of industrial modernity and a thinker deeply suspicious of any mindset that might turn the world into something to be dominated. His work also treats non-human life as morally significant, with abuse of innocent animals registering as an augur of apocalypse.
We get an inkling of this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), where, in an aphoristic turn, he insists:
All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.
I begin here because Blake’s vision of the natural world is a key to understanding Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which takes its title from a line in Blake’s book.
Now, Tokarczuk’s novel has been adapted for the stage by director Eamon Flack, who says the title:
talks about the way we plow the earth for our own means, but that we’re doing it over the bones of the dead and there are many kinds of dead. Part of what the book is about is the way that we live with a whole lot of creatures that are not human.
By the same token, Flack emphasises how the title “belies […] the very wonky, joyful, slightly madcap, gorgeous and eccentric nature of the story”.
Flack’s bravura production seizes on this doubleness. An anarchic energy runs through the show, full of remarkably striking imagery and theatrical invention, in keeping with the novel’s restless blending of modes and moods: the cosmological and the procedural, the comic and the horrific.
‘An ecofeminist fable’
Drive Your Plow is best described as anti-authoritarian ecofeminist fable moonlighting as an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery.
Published in Polish in 2009 and translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018, Tokarczuk’s genre-bending book is set in a rural Polish village near the Czech border, a liminal space where the social order feels simultaneously rigid and strangely permeable.
Tokarczuk’s narrator is Janina Duszejko, an opinionated and talkative older woman. A former teacher and keen amateur astrologer, she is at once an outsider and an obsessive interpreter of the world around her, given to discerning patterns where others see only sheer coincidence.
Not long after the novel starts, Duszejko’s equally unconventional friend Oddball arrives at her door with the news that another neighbour, Bigfoot, has been found dead in his home.
It is the first of a series of unexplained deaths in the community, each circling back, in different ways, to questions of patriarchal authority, institutional violence and the human claim to mastery over the natural world.
Disgusted by the unthinking behaviour of the “neurotic egoists” that surround her, Duszejko becomes convinced that the region’s animals are rightfully “taking revenge on people”.
Capturing the novel’s emotions
Flack’s adaptation is faithful, but by no means deferential. Featuring a rotating cast of characters and making excellent use of Belvoir’s revolving stage, it embraces physical movement, metatheatrical gestures and variations in narrative pace. This renders the novel’s oscillating shifts in emotion and genre into something visually arresting and affectively charged.
At the heart of the production stands Pamela Rabe, a mesmeric Duszejko. On stage for pretty much the entire running time, she anchors the production with an exceptional display, by turns acerbic, droll and extremely moving.
It confirms Rabe is one of the finest actors working in Australia today.
But the production’s merits extend well beyond its central performance. One of its most impressive features is its unwavering commitment to the ensemble of 11 actors.
As Rabe told The Australian, Flack remains
committed to putting a large number of performers on stage, and a great diversity of performers, particularly diverse in terms of age. […] It might seem like financial folly, but he’s committed to making sure storytelling and live performance stay alive in this country.
Flack has an equal commitment to duration. He is a director who allows scenes, images and rhythms to unfold at their own pace. This is not a production in a hurry.
As with his 2023 adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Drive Your Plow stretches towards the outer limits of what contemporary theatre audiences are typically asked to sit with, clocking in at something close to three and a half hours in length.
The play has an unwavering commitment to the collective ensemble.
Brett Boardman/Belvoir
As The Conversation’s Arts and Culture Editor Jane Howard has recently argued, such run times can be risky:
Three and a half hours is the danger zone: the length of many an unabridged classic. The artists, too often, haven’t thought of the way time sits on our bodies and our minds. This is the play you’re most likely to feel restless in, like it has taken up too much of your day, like it has outstayed its welcome.
To be sure, Flack’s production occasionally brushes up against this threshold. And yet, its expansiveness also feels integral to its internal logic. It asks its audiences to dwell – to sit with its eccentricities and moments of drift – until something truly singular and genuinely memorable comes into view.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is at Belvoir, Sydney, until May 10.
Authors: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
