Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead to live stream from The Lowry, Salford

A live stream of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead from The Lowry, Salford will take place this April.

Complicité presents the world premiere of the piece, based on the novel from Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk. The book was translated into English in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Bristol Old Vic will collaborate with MyWorld for the live stream on 27, 28 & 29 April whilst the production runs at The Lowry.

Drive Your Plow’s story begins in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside near the Czech-Polish border. Men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko – an eccentric 65 year-old local woman, ex-engineer, environmentalist, amateur astronomer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake – has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the community shares their isolated, rural home, and she believes they are acting strangely…

A thought-provoking, wry and other worldly murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a love letter to the natural world and the poetry of Blake, the philosopher and poet preoccupied with respecting the natural world. It is also a scathing reproach of toxic masculinity, the treatment of the marginalised, and the hypocrisy of institutional power. At its heart the story asks us to consider what it means to live in harmony with the world around us, humankind’s place in our ecosystem, and the perilous consequences we all face if our connection to the natural world is lost.

Bristol Old Vic’s Executive Director, Charlotte Geeves, said: “We are thrilled to be sharing Complicité’s breathtaking production with a worldwide audience through Bristol Old Vic On Screen. Complicité are one of the world’s most innovative theatre companies; bold storytellers and theatrical pioneers. We knew immediately that their vision for Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead was the perfect fit for our on screen audiences here in the UK and across the world. We are delighted that we can make this happen at The Lowry and we hope this is the first of many partnerships with companies and venues across the UK as we look to present more world class theatre globally.”

Complicité’s Executive Director, Amber Massie-Blomfield, added: “An image we have returned to often in the making of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is that of the mycelium: the remarkable network of fungi that exists deep beneath the forest floor, linking the trees by the roots and transferring water and nutrients throughout the network. A good metaphor for Olga Tokarczuk’s insistent tale about the deep interconnection between humankind and nature – and the perils that await when that relationship is fractured. Great stories are like that mycelium web – they can be a way that we forge links with one another, understand ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves. This important partnership with Bristol Old Vic, MyWorld and The Lowry will enable our story to connect with new audiences in new corners, forging a new solidarity.”

For more information and tickets, visit bristololdvic.org.uk