Imagine the power in that.”Ĭertainly, the production is an explosive unravelling of the hypocrisy of societal norms, and the idea of action being moral, even when it is ‘lawful’ asking why the killing of animals is deemed sport, while that of humans is murder. And Amber Massie-Blomfield, executive director of Complicité, writes: “Witnessing Janina’s story, we might think of ourselves not simply as an audience, but a solidarity. McBurney ends his programme biography by urging the audience to support the international Stop Ecocide campaign. In the intervening years, the climate emergency has deepened, and become ever more fixed in the public consciousness – just as the movement towards veganism as a key means of helping to tackle the crisis has gained momentum. Tokarczuk’s novel was written in 2009, nine years before Antonia Lloyd-Jones translated it into English. It is as if she is possessed by “the vast underground nerves under the earth” – interestingly, in his programme notes, Complicité artistic director Simon McBurney cites mycelium as a recurrent image arising in the rehearsal process.īut as the local catholic priest repeatedly professes, “animals have no soul”, and will therefore get no salvation.

It might seem to her rural community like the furious screaming into the abyss of one isolated “mad old biddy”, but Janina uses her perceived invisibility as “a tool” to act in the name of others, albeit, she reflects, not entirely consciously. This is a story in which Janina becomes convinced that the animals of the plateau on which she lives – killed in great numbers by hunters from the safety of their towers – must seize the agenda, and exact their vengeance. And on seeing a group of mask-clad children preparing to put on a show, she talks of seeing them as a new species, “half human, half animal”. Thus the central question of what it is that allows us as a society to judge animals and humans so differently is an anathema to her.Ī self-styled “solitary she wolf”, she does not, and cannot, differentiate between them, calling her dead dogs her “little girls” whose death sent her into the blackest despair.

Janina admits to being someone who does not believe in perpetual light. Sometimes they are projected onto the backcloth, and then they are pored over, spoken aloud and repeated by Janina, who, like Blake, is utterly preoccupied with the ways in which humanity and morality are aligned, or otherwise fractured.įrom The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument, she recites his words: “Once meek, and in a perilous path, / The just man kept his course along / The Vale of Death”. Kathryn Hunter as Janina Duszejko in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Complicité, Bristol Old Vic (2022) – photo: Camilla Adams

Drive your plough