Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Live Broadcast | Friday

Complicite and Bristol Old Vic On Screen in association with My World present the Live Broadcast of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead direct from The Lowry, Salford.

A Bristol Old Vic On Screen Exclusive.

Based on the book by Olga Tokarczuk, Conceived and Directed by Simon McBurney

Broadcast Live from the Lowry Salford

Experience Complicité’s new five-star hit live wherever you are in the world, broadcast direct from The Lowry in Salford.

"Wizards of the theatre, shamans of the stage and undoubtedly one of the greatest theatre companies to have ever existed, anywhere, Simon McBurney’s Complicité stage the unstageable with supernatural panache" 

Time Out 

Enthralling audiences and critics alike since it opened in January, Bristol Old Vic On Sceen will live broadcast Simon McBurney’s incredible staging of Olga Tokarczuk’s acclaimed novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead for three nights only. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

The Guardian 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

The Observer 

Tickets are strictly limited at each performance - book early to secure yours, and to take advantage of these early bird prices. 

About Drive Your Plow 

Based on Nobel Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name, the darkly comic, anarchic noir caused a seismic reaction in Tokarczuk’s native Poland due to its defiant attack on authoritarian structures, with right-wing press branding the writer an ‘eco-terrorist’ and national traitor. 

The story begins in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. Men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko – an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, devoted 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… 

Engaged in fierce resistance against the injustices around her, Janina refuses to be a prisoner of society and gender. Her actions ask questions both of the male world which surrounds her and of our deeper human intentions: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be animal, and can we separate the two? Why is the killing of animals sport and that of humans murder? 

A thought-provoking, wry and otherworldly murder mystery, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a tale about the cosmos, poetry, and the limitations and possibilities of activism. 

“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. 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.” Complicité Artistic Director, Simon McBurney 

“A new Complicite show isn’t just a devised play: it’s a theatrical event. At the company’s inimitable best, it is a ticket to another world.” Time Out 

“one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created” 

New York Times on Complicité’s award-winning production of The Encounter.

A Complicité co-production with Barbican London, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Bristol Old Vic, Comédie de Genève, 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  

Image: Patryk Hardziej 

Funded by the UKRI Strength in Places Fund, MyWorld is the flagship for the UK’s creative sector and is part of a UK-wide exploration into devolved research and development funding. Led by the University of Bristol, the £30 million programme is made up of 13 partners from the West of England region’s creative technologies sector and world-leading academic institutions to create a unique cross-sector consortium. 

Launched in April 2021, MyWorld will run for 5 years and has a mission to catalyse the region’s creative economy, creating new jobs, driving inward investment and supporting sustainable and inclusive business growth. 

To achieve this, the programme will enable the research and development of new products, processes and services that advance regional capabilities in creative digital production, network distribution and audience evaluation research. With its unique set of creative partners and research collaborators, MyWorld will also deliver ground-breaking experimental productions, invest in innovative research and production facilities, create new skills programmes and develop the region’s creative business ecosystem. Visit www.myworld-creates.com for more information.