2023-11-03 20:30:26
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead – High season
Complicity Idea and direction: Simon McBurney. Revival Co-Director and Original Additional Direction: Kirsty Housley. Based on the novel by Olga Tokarczuk. Cast: Thomas Arnold, Nigel Barrett, Gemma Brockis, Johannes Flaschberger, Amanda Hadingue, Kïren Kebaïli-Dwyer, Weronika Maria, Toby Sedgwick, Sophie Steer, Alexander Uzoka. Municipal Theater of Girona, 2 November.
In a mountain village in Poland, bordering the Czech Republic, a series of murders disrupts the lives of the four neighbors who live there. All the dead have one thing in common, they are members of the local hunting cluband the eccentric Janina, an old woman who lives upside down in animals, astrology and the poetry of William Blakehe sees a message from nature. The fauna wants revenge.
with the controversial novel On the bones of the dead of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk as a starting pointthe prestigious British company Complicité debuted on Temporada Alta on Thursday – Friday and Saturday they repeat at the Municipal Theater – with Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, an extraordinary adaptation with airs of mystery and horror story, humor and a radically ecological message.
Complicité orders nature’s revenge
Simon McBurney directs the montage, an ecothriller of almost three hours that it addresses issues such as environmental activism, spirituality, morality or the marginalization of women, especially from a certain age, in a masterful way.
The protagonist is permanently stuck in front of a microphone facing the audience, however it is not a static monologue; there’s a good bunch of crimes to solve, but it goes far beyond a classic suspense story and some actors play animals, but it’s by no means a fable.
The brilliant interpretation of Amanda Hadinguewhich puts itself in the shoes of Janina, a former engineer turned teacher whom her neighbors call a crazy old woman, transports the viewer to the solitude of the Polish mountains to feel a story that only comes through his eyes and his voice.
Facts, reflections, ideas and even nightmares are intertwined in the narration of the absolute star of the show, while the rest of the performers, nine, do their hearts out to represent their thoughtsbringing people and animals to life in a dark scene that is modulated thanks to projections that give depth to the scene and which mark the passage of the seasons and a choreographic work by the artists to turn the space now into a police station, now into a church or a hospital room.
Despite the increasing tension of the narrative, emphasized by the music, the sound effects and flashes of light that deliberately blind the audience; the vindictive tone and the reflection on free will and predetermination – “heaven is the template that controls our life”, says Janina – in Drive your plow... he does not lack humor.
The cynicism and black humor of the protagonist generate more than one laugh with the small mouth that helps loosen the rope, easing the uncomfortable dilemma about our relationship with animals that raise the assembly and the book, seen by some as an incitement to eco-terrorism.
The director of Temporada Alta, Salvador Sunyer, assures that it took years to get Complicité to set foot in Girona and, in fact, it had been more than a decade since the company’s last visit to Catalonia. Now that we have already tasted the excellence of the product, may it not take so long to return.
#Nature #cries #revenge