Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (Belvoir) ★★★★

Adapted by Eamon Flack from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk. World Premiere. Belvoir St Theatre. 28 Mar – 10 May 2026.

Have Belvoir bitten off more than they can chew? After abruptly postponing opening night, it started to look like The Master & Margarita‘s spiritual successor was in peril. But fear not, despite being close to three and a half hours long — with two intervals — Drive Your Plow… intrigues and entertains more than other 90-minute shows I’ve seen recently.

Mrs Duszejko (Pamela Rabe) lives in a secluded town surrounded by forests where she spends her time reading the works of William Blake, doing astrology charts and looking after the animals around her. Her winter’s night is disturbed when her neighbour, who she refers to as Oddball (Arky Michael/Bruce Spence – depending on the performance), knocks on her door. He’s found their only other neighbour, who she calls Bigfoot, dead in his home — a deer bone lodged in his mouth. And he’s only the first of many. He is soon followed by similarly fauna-adjacent deaths — one found with a head trauma, surrounded by hoof prints, another found with beetles inside their lungs. As Duszejko looks closely into the many deaths she has a sneaking suspicion that something inhuman is going on. What if the animals in the nearby forest have started to get their revenge on the humans?

What has all the hallmarks of a quirky but bleak, prestige TV murder-mystery starring Kate Winslet, quickly becomes something wilder and more unruly. Pamela Rabe holds court, eccentrically dressed, obsessing over star signs and stray deer. As she unreliably narrates, any pretence of a fourth wall is quickly demolished. This isn’t that kind of play. This is a world of impressionistic design (set designer Romanie Harper’s work is as scavenged and recycled as it appears) and scenes that feel as organic as a jam session. Rabe has no qualms riffing off the audience or cheerfully acknowledging when things on stage don’t quite go as planned.

The large ensemble, made up of lead performers in their own right, slide between characters as quickly as they slide the set in and out of position. It’s unusual to have star performers like Nadie Kammallaweera in your cast and only have them utter a handful of lines — surely a quirk of the show’s development and subsequent editing down.

While it lacks the anarchic sense of creation that powered The Master & Margarita, Drive Your Plow… has clearly benefited from a similar genesis. You can feel a sense of authorship among the cast who are completely committed to their parts, whether they’re playing supporting roles or acting as bats. It’s that aura of play that animates Drive Your Plow… and makes the often cold and dark tale highly entertaining.

Was there a faster, more efficient way to tell the story? Probably. There are wickedly amusing moments that could easily be cut, but you’d lose the heart of what this ensemble has created. The murder-mystery plot never feels like the real driving force of the narrative, rather just an excuse for a loose structure around which this cast get to riff. And if I had to give out criticism, I’d have loved to see some more elevated costuming for when the cast play animals (as promised by Brett Boardman’s early promotional image).

It’s purely coincidence but it’s intriguing that Drive Your Plow… is on stage at the same time as An Iliad over at STC. Both are narration-led plays telling violent tales, with a make-shift aesthetic and a dynamic leading performer, and both have produced wildly different shows. Both successful and frustrating in their own ways.

Drive Your Plow… turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, mainly thanks to the personal magnetism of Pamela Rabe around whom this galaxy of star performers orbit. Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, the length doesn’t undermine her beautiful comedic timing as she powers through the gargantuan text. The show is a real investment of time but it pays back in spades.