Modern classics are often turned into stage plays - especially now that many of them are studied at school and are on the exam curriculum.

One of the most intriguing plays I have ever encountered is the latest offering at The Lowry Theatre in Salford.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a fascinating look at how people treat animals and each other.

Based on Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name, the darkly comic, anarchic noir caused a seismic reaction in Tokarczuk’s native Poland due to its defiant attack on authoritarian structures, with right-wing press branding the writer an ‘eco-terrorist’ and national traitor.

The story has been taken by world-renowned international touring company Complicité and presented in this new work for the theatre, directed by Simon McBurney.

The story begins in the depths of winter in a small community on a remote Polish mountainside. 

Men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances and Janina Duszejko - an eccentric older local woman, environmentalist, devoted astronomer and enthusiastic translator of William Blake - has her suspicions. She has been watching the animals with whom the community shares their isolated, rural home, and she believes they are acting strangely.

Engaged in fierce resistance against the injustices around her, Janina refuses to be a prisoner of society and gender.

Her actions ask questions both of the male world which surrounds her and of our deeper human intentions: what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be animal, and can we separate the two? Why is the killing of animals sport and that of humans murder?

The play centres on Janina, played by Olivier Award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter.

Right from the beginning Janina addresses the audience from a lone microphone on the stage in total darkness, with just a single light on her. 

She chats away to us as if we are part of her life, letting us know she has a cough, which is probably Covid and from there on we watch her life unfold - going back and forth. She is in despair as she learns that her neighbours and the men of the town are hunting animals for sport and also eating them.

She tries to approach the authorities - the police, the council, but is dismissed as animals are not seen as important.

When the men start dying in suspicious circumstances, Janina believes the animals are fighting back.

No one listens to the old woman who lives alone in the woods. No one cares as she tries to tell everyone how the natural world has gone wrong.

The whole play, played out on a minimalist stage against a black backdrop with black and white images and scientific diagrams beamed on to it, is thought-provoking and looks at the limitations and possibilities of activism.

Kathryn Hunter is outstanding as Janina. She is the narrator and main character rolled into one - and totally believable as the single voice trying to change the world around her.

The play is staged in almost total darkness which adds to the depressing state of the subject matter, but it grips the audience throughout.

There are also many comedic moments, mainly from Janina’s observations of the people and situations around her.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is an outstanding piece of theatre and one which will leave you thinking about many of the issues facing us in the modern world.