Next to die is the police commandant who comes to investigate, then a wealthy farmer who is caught in a trap, both of them hunters. Is the bone in his throat the cause of death? Outside, two deer appear to be watching Janina thinks they have something to do with it. When she goes to his hut with friendly neighbour Oddball, they find his body and the dismembered remains of a deer that provided his last meal. There’s a hunter she calls Bigfoot she hates he kills animals and treats his dog badly. There is a ghost element too: Janina sees her dead mother in her boiler room. Theirs are the first of a series of deaths that make this a murder mystery. Janina is concerned at the disappearance of her dogs, whom she calls her daughters and suspects that village hunters have shot them. Janina presents her own story, alone on an empty stage, addressing us through a microphone, a little uncertainly at first but growing in confidence, while out of the darkness appear its characters and a combination of scenic elements, video, lighting and sound with which Rae Smith, Dick Straker, Paule Constable and Christopher Shutt create an atmospheric mixture of forest, sky, astrological charts, quoted poems, homesteads, a church and other locations to great effect. It takes its title from a poem by William Blake whose work is several times quoted by its central character Janina Duszejko, a schoolteacher in a mountain village near the Czech border who shares the feelings Blake expresses about the relations between humans and other species. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Polish writer, psychologist and Nobel Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

Blake drive your plow