Drag Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes to our Main Stage from Tues 18 - Sat 18 April 2023
We’re delighted to announce that in spring 2023, we will be one of the co-producing partners for the world premiere of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, led by renowned international touring company, Complicité.
Running on our Main Stage from Tues 18 – Sat 22 April, the new stage adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name is directed by Complicité’s Artistic Director, Simon McBurney.
Complicité is an international touring theatre company in a constant state of reinvention. Working across art forms, the company believes that theatre, opera, film, installation, publication and participatory arts can all be sites for the collective act of imagination. Much of their recent work focuses on the state of our planet and art’s responsibility in encouraging activism.
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.
Complicité’s founding Artistic Director, Simon McBurney, is one of the most innovative and influential theatre-makers working today. An active member of Stop Ecocide, much of Simon’s recent work urgently addresses the destruction of the planet.
“Olga Tokarczuk has created an extraordinary world that speaks to my deepest sense of the continuity between humankind and nature – a world where, like a mycelium web, all entities are connected deeply at the roots, unable to exist alone. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a tale about the cosmos, poetry, and the limitations and possibilities of activism. Tokarczuk is a prophet for our times who understands us in all our hilarity, messiness, cruelty and animalism, and it is a great privilege to bring to the stage what is surely one of literature's most urgent accounts of being alive today.”
“We are delighted to be co-producing with Complicité and other prestigious theatres across the UK and wider Europe to bring this new production to Coventry. This is theatre at its best and not to be missed.”
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is presented by Complicité, in co-production with the Belgrade Theatre, Barbican London Bristol Old Vic, Holland Festival, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, L’Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, The Lowry, The National Theatre of Iceland, Oxford Playhouse, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead runs at the Belgrade from Tuesday 18 – Saturday 22 April 2023. Tickets will go on sale later this year.