“There’s a very deep sense of impermanence, as if people know they’re only here for a bit and it probably will revert to something else afterwards. This difficult history taps into a longstanding Complicité preoccupation with memory and migration. It’s in Lower Silesia, a region that only became part of southern Poland after the second world war. The first stage of research for Drive Your Plow was to visit Tokarczuk at her home in Poland, where she bonded with McBurney over homemade schnapps, and introduced him to the landscape which is so central to its character. “He offered a portal to a European imagination.” The fact that he went off and examined something else was inspiring,” says McBurney. “Peter chose not to take the conventional path, but to pursue a different kind of life to the commercial one in London. The death of Brook was a moment because, though McBurney himself didn’t join the maestro’s theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, many of his collaborators did, not least Magni and Hunter. Photograph: Camilla Adamsįor Complicité, the international touring production marks a return to an eastern- and middle-European terrain that it has made its own through acclaimed adaptations of the works of Bruno Schulz, Daniil Kharms and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. Kathryn Hunter, who will play Janina, at a read-through of Drive Your Plow. We were aware that he was ill for a year, but we didn’t understand the speed of it.” “I think the fact that the piece is about loss, and that we’ll make it together, is a wonderful thing because originally I wanted him to be involved, assuming that he would be well enough to come and work with us. “It’s an incredibly painful moment,” says McBurney, who co-founded the company with Magni and Annabel Arden back in 1983.

Hunter is back in the show at her own request, the “personal reasons” having played out in the shocking death of her husband, Marcello Magni. In September, when we talk again on Zoom, things have settled down. There’s a fair amount of eye-rolling as the production team struggle to keep on top of the timetable for the upcoming show, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which is quite literally on the drawing board. Kathryn Hunter has just dropped out of the lead role in Complicité’s latest production for unspecified personal reasons, and he has one of his three young children in tow. The morning’s schedule has been thrown by a live stream of Peter Brook’s funeral from Paris. T ime feels out of joint, in a very Shakespearean sense, when I first meet up with Simon McBurney near his Gloucestershire home in July.

Drive your plow