A woman in her 60s, wearing a shabby tracksuit top and holding a carrier bag, stands in the middle of the wide Barbican theatre stage. She is speaking from behind a mic. She doesn’t seem the sort to be centre stage; she has a marginal look. It is not clear whether she is altogether sane or why she should be in charge of the story. This is in keeping with Polish Nobel-prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s extraordinary novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), upon which Complicité’s show is based. You do not know where you are with Janina Duszejko or where you are going. She is an unreliable witness. An amateur astrologer who relies on the horoscopes she has drawn up herself, she was, she says, given the wrong name – it is as if her real identity were just out of our sight. The doubt about whether to trust her is a burden throughout the novel and this prevailing uncertainty has been brilliantly poached for the stage version by dramaturgs Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook.
We are in a remote Polish village near the Czech border, a place where even when spring comes, the mood stays wintry. This uncommon thriller, an eco-noir, works on the mind like a seizure of cold. In a small community the body count of murdered men from the local hunting club is unsteadily rising. Rae Smith’s black-and-white set, in collaboration with Christopher Shutt’s sound, Paule Constable’s lighting and Dick Straker’s video design, is masterly. In a world dominated by black and white, snowflakes fall like iron filings, and at one point the stage is taken over by the movement of fieldfares in a torrent of light – an exhilarating interplay between screen images and the movement of actors. At intervals, a flashing gun goes off, giving the audience a fright, as though we might be targets. The stage itself has not much more than a kitchen table to furnish it.
