Time feels out of joint, in a very Shakespearean sense, when I first meet up with Simon McBurney near his Gloucestershire home in July. The morning’s schedule has been thrown by a live stream of Peter Brook’s funeral from Paris. Kathryn Hunter has just dropped out of the lead role in Complicité’s latest production for unspecified personal reasons, and he has one of his three young children in tow. There’s a fair amount of eye-rolling as the production team struggle to keep on top of the timetable for the upcoming show, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which is quite literally on the drawing board.
In September, when we talk again on Zoom, things have settled down. Hunter is back in the show at her own request, the “personal reasons” having played out in the shocking death of her husband, Marcello Magni. “It’s an incredibly painful moment,” says McBurney, who co-founded the company with Magni and Annabel Arden back in 1983. “I think the fact that the piece is about loss, and that we’ll make it together, is a wonderful thing because originally I wanted him to be involved, assuming that he would be well enough to come and work with us. We were aware that he was ill for a year, but we didn’t understand the speed of it.”
The show in question is an adaptation of a novel by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, which was attacked as eco-terrorism in some quarters when it was first published in Poland in 2009. Set in an isolated village in the bleak Polish winter, Drive Your Plow is both an existentialist eco-thriller and a darkly comic feminist detective story. It confronts its eccentric protagonist, Janina – a devotee of the poet William Blake – with the task of solving the gruesome murders of a series of men, starting with a neighbour she has nicknamed Big Foot, who is discovered with a splinter of bone rammed down his throat.
For Complicité, the international touring production marks a return to an eastern- and middle-European terrain that it has made its own through acclaimed adaptations of the works of Bruno Schulz, Daniil Kharms and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. The death of Brook was a moment because, though McBurney himself didn’t join the maestro’s theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, many of his collaborators did, not least Magni and Hunter. “Peter chose not to take the conventional path, but to pursue a different kind of life to the commercial one in London. The fact that he went off and examined something else was inspiring,” says McBurney. “He offered a portal to a European imagination.”
The first stage of research for Drive Your Plow was to visit Tokarczuk at her home in Poland, where she bonded with McBurney over homemade schnapps, and introduced him to the landscape which is so central to its character. It’s in Lower Silesia, a region that only became part of southern Poland after the second world war. This difficult history taps into a longstanding Complicité preoccupation with memory and migration. “There’s a very deep sense of impermanence, as if people know they’re only here for a bit and it probably will revert to something else afterwards. It has its own poverty which arises out of that sense of impermanence,” says McBurney. For instance, there was no community hub in the central square of the local town until Tokarczuk set up a cafe with a friend. It’s called Dobra Nowina, which means Good News and is the nickname of a young woman who runs a secondhand clothes shop in Drive Your Plow.
Tokarczuk picks up the story over email. “We met in March and the early spring in southern Poland is the most ‘classic’ time of year,” she writes. “The landscape is calm, sunlit and rather sedate, even austere. Maybe a little hostile. I showed him the things that matter as I see it – my house, which is a bit like Janina’s, the ruins of a manor house nearby, local nature and how human beings try to drive a wedge into it wherever possible. We immediately sensed that we have a lot in common. It’s rare to find that someone you’ve never met before shares your way of looking at the world.”
Part of what they have in common is an insistence on approaching literature through the bigger picture, or as the novelist has succinctly put it: “Just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time.” Whereas Tokarczuk is an animated speaker, as anyone who has witnessed one of her many festival appearances will know, McBurney talks slowly and deliberately, worrying away at every question, unwilling to be reduced to someone else’s thoughtbite. At one point in our first meeting he surfaces from a particularly agonising silence to admit that he finds it hard to relinquish control. “I have to accept that this will be your interpretation.”
When, in our September conversation, I ask if he thinks the dark themes of the novel have become more relevant over a politically calamitous summer, not only involving the collapse of government in the UK but the rise of the far right across Europe, he replies: “It’s such an interesting word, ‘relevant’. I think perhaps it means that it will be heard more clearly, or that it will activate different things in people, I can’t really tell.” Then he unspools an answer so baroque that it feels like being sucked into a Complicité rehearsal room, that place where bleakness and comedy meet in a fizz of synapses that spills out into an unclassifiable and entirely original theatricality.
“I think that, underneath the book, questions and themes are bound together by a story that is extremely compelling,” he says. “But these questions and themes are about what it means to be human. And that sounds like a rather weak generalisation. So I will try to think about what I mean by it. I suppose it comes back to the book. It’s about a 65-year-old woman. Her humanity, if you can call it that, comes shining through, partly because she’s so funny. She’s witty, she’s extraordinarily self-aware. And when she goes off on a rant, she then parodies herself. She gives a most wonderful soliloquy in a police station about the monstrosity of the industrial slaughter of animals to keep human appetite and greed satisfied. Yet she punctuates that soliloquy with hilarious descriptions of herself, physically, while she is doing it, so this self-awareness is marvellously human and humorous.”
Halfway through this soliloquy it occurs to me that he is describing the future performance of the 65-year-old Hunter, who most recently triumphed as Lear at the Globe, after co-starring with Magni in Ionesco’s absurdist play The Chairs at London’s Almeida theatre. But he’s not stopping there. “… And I remember somebody telling me – it might not be true [it is, according to the nature writer Robert Macfarlane] – that the word human comes from humando, which means to bury. So there is something in the piece about what our humanity has to do with things that are bigger than ourselves,” he says.
“I don’t know if your parents are alive, but I participated in the death of both of mine. When somebody’s very close to you – and I’ve had many close friends die – there’s the grieving and the pain, but also there’s the whole question of where they are. Which, for us, as a contemporary society, would be, well, nowhere. But of course, they’re not just gone, because they remain in our imagination. And imagination and memory, as we know, are the same thing: they operate in the same way, within the brain. That is to say, you need an imagination to remember.”
When I ask the same question of Tokarczuk, of the period since Drive Your Plow was published, she replies: “Of course, a great deal has changed. Above all there has been a colossal, revolutionary change in our view of how greatly human activity disturbs the climate, how rapidly all sorts of animals are becoming extinct, but most of all we have come to feel the effect on our own bodies, thanks to air pollution (which causes tens of thousands of premature deaths in Poland each year) and the lack of water.
“The pandemic showed us just how fragile we are, how highly we depend on nature, and that our relationship with it is stronger than we’ve ever imagined. I also think a change of paradigm in our approach to the world is taking place right before our eyes: the anthropological point of view is giving way to a new, more animist and relational one. We can see our own, inseparable connection with the world, and the world seems to us far more complicated in its co-dependencies than ever before. The focal points in our thinking about morality and ethics in general are moving in a different direction too. This is a time of transition to something new. Now I think the figure of Janina is ahead of her time.”
It seems rash, in the youth-obsessed world of today, to suggest that a 65-year-old Blake obsessive with a love of animals and a knack for self-deprecation might suggest a way forward. But the strength of Janina is that she offers possibilities unique to each person who encounters her. With McBurney, Tokarczuk and Hunter behind her, who could possibly fail to be moved?
