Belvoir's Drive Your Plow Adaptation Lacks Novel's Radical Heart
When Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk published Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in 2009, the Polish author faced accusations of inciting eco-terrorism. This remarkable reaction greeted a novel centered on a sixty-something English teacher, Mrs Duszejko, who recounts a series of murders in her remote village. All the victims are hunters, and Mrs Duszejko insists that local animals are enacting summary justice, leading most villagers to dismiss her as mad.
Tokarczuk's book is profoundly radical, proposing a way of thinking about animals that, when fully embraced, explodes conventional worldviews. It is transgressive in subtler ways too, featuring a protagonist rarely seen in literature: a smart, rebellious, eccentric, angry, and effective older woman. This makes it a brilliant choice for theatre, particularly appealing to its substantial audience of women in this demographic.
Pamela Rabe's Brilliant Performance
In Belvoir St Theatre's adaptation, written and directed by artistic director Eamon Flack, Pamela Rabe delivers a brilliant portrayal of Mrs Duszejko. She masterfully blends deadpan humour with deep emotion, social discomfort, and a touch of the ridiculous. Rabe leads a supremely entertaining production that is funny, engrossing, visually gorgeous, and playful.
Flack's lo-fi "theatre as make-believe" aesthetic is in full force, with actors creating snow blizzards from confetti and fans, and rain squalls from spray bottles. Miraculously, the show's three-and-a-half-hour runtime never feels overly long. The adaptation is remarkably faithful, condensing the novel's action while preserving key events and chronology, and lifting Tokarczuk's sublimely droll narration and dialogue seemingly word for word.
Faithful Recreation with a Missing Core
The creative team and ensemble of eleven actors beautifully recreate the distinctive milieu of the novel: a remote Polish plateau populated by societal drop-outs from cities and locals hardened by harsh weather, impoverishment, and a history of violence. Mrs Duszejko's chosen family includes her taciturn neighbour Oddball (played by Arky Michael and Bruce Spence), her former student Dizzy (Daniel R Nixon), and local thrift shop assistant Good News (Emma Diaz).
Many actors also double as animals, played straight and dressed as humans, which smartly amplifies the novel's post-humanist manifesto. Having these actors-as-animals watch from the sidelines is a nice touch, though it would be more effective if consistently applied.
The Lost Sense of Rage and Horror
However, something crucial is missing: the radical, angry heart of Tokarczuk's novel and its profound sense of grief and horror. This is a murder mystery where deaths are gruesome and disturbing, necessary to mirror the cruelty inflicted on animals. The final reveal of the murderer and their motivation should feel like a kick in the guts. In this production, each death is delivered as light comedy, stripping away the satisfaction of understanding the motivations behind them.
This omission is a significant shame because the most radical aspect of Tokarczuk's novel is its proposal that rage can be a clarifying and positive force. It feels urgently relevant today, testing a thesis for dealing with authoritarianism, patriarchy, and eco-crisis while validating the distress of living in a world where morality and law are often divorced.
Undercut Tension and Catharsis
Losing the novel's deeply felt rage, horror, and grief undercuts dramatic tension and catharsis. The final reveal feels weirdly muted, passing too quickly and calmly on stage and eliciting no discernible reaction from the audience. This is compounded by cutting a crucial late novel scene involving a sermon on hunting merits, one of the book's key moments.
In the final act, Flack seems to rush to wrap up, just when scenes need space to breathe and fully land with the audience. The play feels slightly messy and unresolved in other ways too. The ensemble often feels underutilised, with satisfying choreographic scenes making you wish for more. Actors like Paula Arundell and Nadie Kammallaweera feel particularly wasted.
Flack makes a very particular style of theatre, and there are moments where he captures the text's weird mania, such as a dress-up dance party of mushroom pickers or a flock of fieldfares dispatching magpie foes via defecation. Yet, it is hard to shake the feeling that what he wants to do as a director and what Tokarczuk's text demands do not quite mesh. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead runs at Belvoir St Theatre until 10 May.
