In 2023, Belvoir scored a critical answer audience hit with its adaptation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Three years later, director-adaptor Eamon Flack takes a similar ‘rough magic’ approach to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It doesn’t reach the same dazzling, dizzying heights, however.

Published in Poland in 2009 (and translated into English in 2018), Tokarczuk’s novel is set in a village near the Czech border, where a series of grisly killings of prominent men – all avid hunters – has the community on edge. With the local police short on imagination, an eccentric loner and keen astrologer, Janina Duszejko (Pamela Rabe), sets out to solve the mystery herself.

It begins with the death of Janina’s neighbour, whom she calls ‘Bigfoot’, found with a deer bone lodged in his throat. Other bodies follow: one bludgeoned and ringed by hoof prints, another discovered decomposing and riddled with beetle larvae.

Guided by her star charts, her loathing of hunting (she believes her beloved dogs were shot for sport) and her deep antipathy toward the patriarchy, Janina becomes convinced the killings are the work of a vengeful animal kingdom. All she has to do is prove it. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Photo © Brett Boardman

Taking its title from William Blake, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead blends elements of detective story, eco-revenge fable and philosophical enquiry. Sketching a portrait of post-Communist Poland in flux, it poses pointed questions: what separates ‘human’ from ‘animal’? Why is killing a deer considered sport, while killing a hunter is murder? Is the possession of a soul, as the local priest insists, uniquely human?

Flack’s adaptation treads some familiar ground. The staging (designed by Romanie Harper) is stripped back: a revolve on a bare stage, homespun props, minimal set. Blizzards arrive as handfuls of confetti; winds are conjured by actors wielding portable blowers. 

While the piece moves fairly swiftly over its three-plus-hour runtime, it never quite shakes a sense of dramatic stasis. The whodunit mechanics tick along well enough, but the heavy reliance on narration keeps the action at a remove, blunting the shock and strangeness that ought to accumulate.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Photo © Brett Boardman

There is much to enjoy moment to moment. Rabe is, as ever, commanding – funny, flinty and playful to the point where she questions the reliance on her own narration. Flack’s ensemble create vivid, sometimes wryly comic sketches in multiple roles. Colin Moody – always a treat to watch – is roguishly charming as an entomologist with whom Janina has a fling. Bruce Spence is a winningly lugubrious presence as Oddball. Gareth Davies is steely as the investigator Black Coat. 

The homespun theatricality has its charm, too – even if it occasionally feels illustrative rather than transformative.

For all its provocative ideas and flashes of invention, the production feels like one circling its themes. The drama accumulates rather than escalates, and the central mystery – rich with moral and metaphysical possibility – resolves without impact. The solution to the whodunnit falls oddly flat in a work caught between showing and telling.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead plays at Belvoir, Surry Hills, Sydney until 10 May.