2023-10-21 05:59:58
As if nature had taken justice on its own, all the members of a hunting club in a small mountain village on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic die under strange circumstances. It’s impossible to know what happened to them, though Janina, a septuagenarian practically invisible to the eyes of the neighborhood, attributes it to a revenge of the animal kingdom. She explains it, convinced, in front of a standing microphone that presides over the stage, from where she lends her voice to the victims of hunters and cries out against the deaths of roe deer and foxes, killed, in her opinion, as wild as is the fauna ofthis village represented through an ingenious projection system that gives depth to the scene and evokes the passing of the seasons. They are four poorly counted houses, almost uninhabited during the winter, where the old woman lives in solitude, completely obsessed with finding in the stars the keys that justify the debacle of our days.
Janina is the absolute queen of Drive your plow over the bones of the deadthe novel by the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarcuzk that has been staged by the prestigious company Complicité, with Britain’s Simon McBurney at the helm. After years of chasing him, finally one of the best names on the international scene will make his debut at Temporada Alta on November 2, 3 and 4 at the Teatre Municipal de Gironasix years after his last visit to Catalan stages.
Days before landing at the festival, the thriller Complicité’s ecological tour passed through the Onassis Stegi, the cultural center of the Greek tycoon’s foundation in Athens: 18,000 square meters including two auditoriums, with a main one with 880 seats, full for the four functions in three days of Drive your plow... Some of the pieces from Onassis’ art collection, including an imposing Rodin, greeted viewers at the entrancea show that, for McBurney, tells a “local story in a specific place that, in essence, raises a series of questions that are urgent for everyone”.
«It asks the only questions that have validity in our time: what it means to be an animal, what it means to be knowingly mean to an animal or how to resist in a world where you feel helpless», explained the director in a meeting with journalists, adding that, in addition to our relationship with animals, ideas such as the patriarchal system, the marginalization of women, the weight of the church and how we see ourselves in the world also hover over the book and the show.
“Janina is interested in astrology because she looks for patterns, the world is a network and everything is interconnected and that’s how we understand it too”, pointed out the director.
Tokarcuzk has “a very poetic way of writing, there is something at the heart of the novel that moved me and we had to look for a plot line that did not copy what the novel says, but found the gesture that underlies the author’s words», assured McBurney to the press.
“It is very important how you decide to tell this story, that is at the same time one thriller, a horror story, a comedy and a tragedy and shows how the protagonist grows smaller as her world is destroyedsaid Kirsty Housley, co-director of the restoration and assistant director of the original, as Complicité has done several versions of the set over the years.
Regarding the ecological message of the montage and of the novel, which is translated into Spanish with the title On the bones of the dead (Siruela), McBurney stated that “we are in a catastrophic moment of collapse” in which “everything refers us to ecology and nature” and “we are integrated into the natural system, but we talk about it as if we were separate from it”.
“The big fossil fuel companies are raising a debate that shouldn’t be: questioning climate change makes you think it’s not here, instead of deciding how we should face it,” he said.
A “constellation of stories”
“It’s a difficult novel, told in the first person with the voice of an old woman, and little by little we are completely absorbed by her thoughts”, noted McBurney, adding that it is also “very interesting to reflect on what it means to be a woman of almost seventy, invisible to society, and to be in a place where you are not listened to”.
Janina, a bridge engineer turned teacher, caretaker of her neighbors’ second homes and amateur astrologer she is masterfully played by Amanda Hadingue, the show’s total master of ceremonies.
The core of characters that make up the story, represented by a dozen actors, reach the viewer through their eyes and their story, which goes beyond the simple monologue: “all the characters and animals in the book are on stage as a product of the protagonist’s imagination, to weave a web, like constellations of stories from different moments, harmonized in an unconventional way».
The assembly, which has the approval of Olga Tokarcuzk, has been on stages in Vienna, Paris or Amsterdam, generating “very diverse reactions depending on the country”, according to Housley. It remains to be seen what the public thinks about it in Poland, the author’s native country and where the novel was very controversial, because although Complicité “would love” to represent it there, at the moment there is no no closed date
With forty years of experience behind it, Complicité is, in McBurney’s words, more than a company, a “meeting of artists who come and go to be able to do their own projects”: “it’s a constant back and forth, without a single definition that allows us to say ‘this is how they work, this is what they do’, but rather a collective that responds to the context in which the world finds itself at that particular moment».
In this sense, he detailed that the company works in different languages and artistic formatsalways with the fundamental objective of “reflecting the world as it is” and of “making things come out of their labels, rather than producing products to sell”.
The collective “is constantly evolving and changing its identity”, like its shows, which is why the version of Drive your plow... that will be seen in Girona is, in fact, the third that the company proposes and will be “thought and reworked” for the fourth in New York at the end of next year.
Asked how the ecological message of the show matches the intense international activity of Complicité, he declared that it is a subject “that generates a lot of internal reflection”, because although they try to “reduce emissions as much as possible”, they want “the voice of the company to reach the world”.
“It would be wonderful to perform only in the UK, but that excludes a lot of people you want to connect with and we live in an age where the separation of people is a weapon of power“, said the director, who feels more appreciated abroad than at home -“when we tour England, we do it losing money”- and has a very pessimistic view of his country, ruled by “authorities who cling desperately in power” and “make communication with other countries impossible”.
“There has been a constant decline that makes creation difficult” i “culture is considered an economic sect”, opined the leader of a company that “has always been on the margins of everything, including British culture”. A. Carmona. Athens
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