It is not easy for English companies to rotate, due to the multitude of bureaucratic problems that their movements entail. But Complicité and Estación Alta have worked hard so that the production Drive your plow over the bones of the dead can be seen at the Girona festival, on a tour that also visits Geneva, Hamburg and Athens.
In this city, La Vanguardia was able to attend the European premiere and see the great reception that the Greek public gave to this magnificent production, where Simon McBurney's company demonstrates its theatrical muscle, forged over 40 years, which looks radiant and groundbreaking. .
Between November 2 and 4, the Municipal Theater of Girona will present this theatrical adaptation of the novel by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, which represents the Spanish premiere and is the only city in the State where it can be seen. The novel was translated as On the bones of the dead (Siruela), but whose literal translation would be 'Drive your plow over the bones of the dead'.
In this story, Janina Duszejko, who is an environmentalist, astrology fan and enthusiastic translator of William Blake, relates her particular suspicions about the murders of some hunters, in a kind of environmental thriller.
The director of Complicité, Simon McBurney, gives some details of this production to La Vanguardia: “We have adapted Tokarczuk's work and, from the beginning, it has taken three different forms. And I think that in New York we will present a fourth adaptation. As a company, we do not stop moving and evolving.”
“The novel has to do with the story of a sequence of deaths in a small town in southern Poland, near the border,” continues McBurney. The story revolves around a teacher and engineer, who has ended up living in a violent area, which had previously been German and has inhabitants from Ukraine. She has interested me because the story not only catches and captivates you, because the hunters apparently die at the hands of the animals they have killed with impunity. The protagonist, who is over 60 years old, questions herself about it and wants to discover what is happening.”
The director considers that it is a universal work: “What happens not only concerns Poland, but has to do with the patriarchal system and how we relate and behave with animals. The work raises questions that are the only ones that are valid in our times: What does it mean to be an animal? How can you consciously be bad?”
McBurney acknowledges that the adaptation was difficult: “The novel is narrated in the first person and we are absorbed by what she thinks and does and how she evolves in the story. She also raises what it means to be an older woman, an invisible woman, with a voice that no one hears. It was an idea that she wanted to work with the actors to bring her voice to life. First I thought of a soliloquy with her in the middle of the stage, but then I thought that we had to add the other characters to enter and leave the stage. We have translated her language into theater.”
“We are in an ecological disaster and everything points us back to that. When we talk about ecology we sometimes treat it as if it were an entity separate from us. But we are part of nature, we cannot leave it, just as we cannot escape the planet. Tokarczuk hunters believe that they control nature through hunting, as if it were something separate. The work raises how we relate to nature and why we do not protest,” he concludes.
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