Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Complicité serves up a little too much of a nightmarish thing

It’s 40 years since the birth of Theatre de Complicité (subsequently just ‘Complicité’). In that time, the company has galvanised our theatre culture. Combining visual flair with intellectual curiosity, it has travelled the world and brought the world to our too-insular stage.

With his touring adaptation of the Booker-shortlisted Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) by the Nobel Prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk, artistic director Simon McBurney returns to a Polish author for inspiration. Just over 30 years ago, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles proved a landmark, conjuring Polish provincial life in a welter of dream-like vignettes, its opening coup de théâtre a man strolling down a wall.

There’s nothing of that order here, though, in its own way, the evening strives to defy gravity. Using projection, it often conjures the celestial as its astrologically minded heroine, 65-year-old Janina, picks her way through the wintry killing fields of her rural backwater, where animal life is cheap (and the few locals very eccentric).

Those responsible for the senseless carnage, though – including town bigwigs – are meeting aptly grisly ends. Casting a wry eye (assisted by a stand-up style mic) on the funny-peculiar goings-on, the eco-minded, but quite possibly cuckoo Janina offers her own view: that the animal kingdom is rising up against its oppressors.

With the verse and vision of William Blake – a poetical polemicist for animal rights – as a lodestar reference, the piece, on page and stage, plots a course between old-fashioned thriller and parable for our times. Even if your head solves, and swiftly, the whodunnit aspect, the core contention – of nature revolting - is felt on the bones.

The production is excellent at spiriting up and sustaining that nightmarish, visceral quality – with howling winds, remorseless gun-shots, much darkness (interspersed with deliberate bedazzlement). The tricks of Complicite’s trade are no less spellbinding for being familiar. Splayed fingers held aloft by hooded figures in black puffer jackets denote statue-still stags; Janina sprawls on the floor and camerawork projects her in outline as the jelly-fish she likens herself to, free from her human pain.

The actors, including some old-hands (Tim McMullan and César Sarachu), serve the bare-bones approach fleetly and beautifully. Amanda Hadingue (alternate casting with the currently indisposed Kathryn Hunter) is delightfully impish and chattily conspiratorial in the lead, finally immensely moving. The snag? Given the episodic and even lumbering nature of the beast, some cutting wouldn’t hurt. As the yarn stands – at a potentially yawn-inducing three hours – this looks like a valuable addition to the Complicite corpus but a not quite (or not yet) vintage one.

At the Barbican until Sat (020 7870 2500; barbican.org.uk), then touring until April 29; complicite.org