19 January – 11 February

International touring company Complicité presents a new work for the theatre, directed by Simon McBurney and based on Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name.

It all begins in the depths of winter…
In a small community on a remote mountainside near the Czech-Polish border, men from the local hunting club are dying in mysterious circumstances. Janina Duszejko – ex-engineer, environmentalist, devoted astrologer 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… 

Olga Tokarczuk’s “marvelously weird and fablelike mystery” (The New York Times) is a whodunnit unlike any other. A rallying cry for nature, it explosively exposes the hypocrisy of institutional power.

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?

Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, King Street, Bristol, BS1 4ED.

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