Education and culture then come head-to-head with (male) authority and death.
It looks at first as if the animal world – brilliantly and beautifully realised by Rae Smith (set and costume design), Paule Constable, (lighting) and Dick Straker, (video) – is taking its natural revenge on the hunters in the woodland – the two-dimensional figures known as the Commandant, the Priest, the President, sometimes known only by their nicknames.įighting against the animal cruelty is a gentler group, formed around Janina, translating Blake’s poems, selling second-hand clothing and studying endangered beetles. The title itself comes from the quintessential English mystical poet and painter William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, and his poems and images provide a backdrop to the murder-mystery story centred around the ageing, reclusive “eco-warrior“ and astrologer Janina Duszejko. The play is based on the 2009 novel by Nobel prize winning Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, set in the remote Polish woodland near the Czech border. The pan-European cast – not identified with individual roles – moves fluidly through life and death, human and animal, as interconnected as the forest eco-systems projected behind them. The theatre company, founded in 1983 by the current artistic director Simon McBurney, uses text, movement, mime, music, lighting and video to create an enraged cry against “ecocide”. The rapturous Oxford Playhouse audience – with a large contingent from an Oxfordshire secondary school – were spellbound for the full three hours. Not so much a fairy tale, despite the overtones of The Brothers Grimm in the dark woodlands of Eastern Europe, this is more a morality tale for our times. Complicité, with its multi-media devised production of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, at Oxford Playhouse this week, has triumphed.
0 kommentar(er)
