Various characters come and go, including Good News (Weronika Maria) who provides her with clothes, the Grey Lady writer of horror books and the entomologist Boros (Johannes Flaschberger) who moves in with her for a while, before the sudden revelation of how exactly the hunters all died-which I won't give away. She uses astrology to predict the time and manner of the deaths of the hunters, including the police chief, which come about, one by one, but no one believes her theory, even her friend, former pupil and Blake translator Dizzy (Alexander Uzoka), and she is dismissed by most as a batty old woman. She concludes he choked on a bone from an animal he killed and ate, the remains of which she collects for burial, and that the animals are taking revenge on the hunters. Janine is committed to advocating equal rights for animals, that they should not be ill-treated or killed for food, but Bigfoot was one of the local hunters who abused his dog. It begins with a death, when neighbour Oddball (César Sarachu)-she has nicknames for everyone in her community-tells her that another neighbour, Bigfoot, is dead.

The story comes from the 2009 novel of the same name by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, but the telling is distinctly Complicité, beginning simply with a single storyteller at the mic introducing herself to the audience-in The Encounter it was Simon McBurney here it is the incomparable Kathryn Hunter-before an explosion of music and video and hi-tech effects, but the technology always serves the story and is never gratuitous.Īlthough there is a well-drilled ensemble playing various characters, human and animal, this is largely a three-hour monologue by Hunter, in which she plays Janina Duszejko, a former teacher of English literature and advocate of Blake-whose lines of poetry and philosophical ideas litter the text-who has also been an engineer but now lives in a small rural community near to the Czech-Polish border.

Drive the plow over the bones