drive your plow over the bones of the dead blake

There is such an affinity between Tokarczuk’s blackly comic imagination and the company’s preoccupation with darkness, physicality and the eccentric (they have adapted Haruki Murakami, Bruno Schulz and Daniil Kharms). The fascinating thing is that, were you to read the novel without knowing Complicité was making a show of it, you could almost guess that it might. The stage itself has not much more than a kitchen table to furnish it. At intervals, a flashing gun goes off, giving the audience a fright, as though we might be targets. In a world dominated by black and white, snowflakes fall like iron filings, and at one point the stage is taken over by the movement of fieldfares in a torrent of light – an exhilarating interplay between screen images and the movement of actors.

Rae Smith’s black-and-white set, in collaboration with Christopher Shutt’s sound, Paule Constable’s lighting and Dick Straker’s video design, is masterly. In a small community the body count of murdered men from the local hunting club is unsteadily rising. This uncommon thriller, an eco-noir, works on the mind like a seizure of cold. We are in a remote Polish village near the Czech border, a place where even when spring comes, the mood stays wintry. The doubt about whether to trust her is a burden throughout the novel and this prevailing uncertainty has been brilliantly poached for the stage version by dramaturgs Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and Laurence Cook. An amateur astrologer who relies on the horoscopes she has drawn up herself, she was, she says, given the wrong name – it is as if her real identity were just out of our sight.

You do not know where you are with Janina Duszejko or where you are going. This is in keeping with Polish Nobel-prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s extraordinary novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), upon which Complicité’s show is based. It is not clear whether she is altogether sane or why she should be in charge of the story. She doesn’t seem the sort to be centre stage she has a marginal look. A woman in her 60s, wearing a shabby tracksuit top and holding a carrier bag, stands in the middle of the wide Barbican theatre stage.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead blake