'Drive Your Plough...' - Masterful narrative theatre by Simon McBurney is a lesson for every viewer #HF23

A word says more than a thousand images. This may seem strange in a world that thrives on visual culture, but it is a truism. If you have yet to see cows of all shapes and sizes, let the Holland Festival convince you. Yesterday, I saw the opening performance 'Drive Your Plough Over The Bones Of The Dead' and there were so many images in it that it made me dizzy, even though the piece consists mostly of language.

'Drive Your Plough...' is the stage adaptation of the book of the same name by Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, published in the Netherlands under the title 'Chase Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead'. The adaptation was made by Simon McBurney with his company Complicité, a London-based club that has been a guest at the Holland Festival several times, and which Princess Beatrix (and me) have made into the regular fans may count.

Pimples

Now there are those who get pimples from the term 'regular guest at the Holland Festival' because they still think it stands for complicated, pompous, elitist and difficult. Then, when the word 'Nobel Prize' is also dropped, the Holland mawkishness kicks in mercilessly.

But how unjustified that all is, I thus experienced at that princess opening.

In fact, what Simon Mcburney understands better than anyone else is that you shouldn't start spoiling a book, which is a narrative, by depicting it. For the same reason, for instance, people should also stay away from Bruce Springsteen's lyrics with their film gear.

Master writers, and Olga Tokarczuk is one of them, witness the Nobel Prize that puts her on a par with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan, know how to evoke images in the reader's mind with their words, and that is what makes writing one of the most special and diverse and inclusive forms of art.

Great talent for humour

Therefore, therefore, McBurney simply has the story told by a not-so-young female narrator with a great talent for humour. With her, as in the book, we go on an adventure into a world where animals and plants are finally defended by a human, and nature takes revenge on our indifference.

Because it is about the world as the narrator sees it, any kind of realistic imagination is excluded. The other actors play interlocutors as well as dogs, deer or wild boar, or forest. McBurney, sound fan as he is, provides all this with a beautiful soundscape with a few violent outliers, and projections that never get in the way of your own imagination, but fully support it.

Playful

All this leads to a performance that offers the mature Holland Festival audience something rarely seen in our often rather serious and conceptual adult theatre offerings. I know such exciting theatre, with a narrative as its starting point, mostly from the better youth theatre, and that McBurney dares to present it to this audience is a godsend.

Such a playful performance our great theatre directors like Ivo Van Hove, Eric de Vroedt or Daria Bukvic would not dare to make anytime soon. It is purely thanks to that supposedly elitist Holland Festival that we can become acquainted with such imaginative and accessible theatre. It should serve as a lesson for me to give imagination free rein in our theatres.

And so such storytelling theatre is not cheap, even if it would seem so. What goes out of technology here exceeds the budget of even our major companies, as a few years ago painfully obvious became. So let's invest in that as well.

Full-Wappie

And another thing: in the book (and performance), the lead role is given to a wayward sixty-something. That doesn't happen often, but should happen much more often. Here we see before us a matured and utterly quirky type, delightfully clashing with prevailing standards of decency and right-thinking. In her fanatical animal love and her belief in astrology, the mentally challenged English teacher Olga Tokarczuk presents us with is an exciting person to identify with as a viewer, because 'full-wappie', and violent too.

That we nevertheless hold her in our hands, and cannot really reject her actions, is due to the Nobel Prize-worthy storytelling, which McBurney leaves so aptly intact. After three years of mutual separation due to a society-disrupting pandemic, that is perhaps the best outcome of this play.