Like all true visionaries, the English poet William Blake was light-years ahead of his time: a fierce critic of industrial modernity and a thinker deeply suspicious of any mindset that might turn the world into something to be dominated. His work also treats non-human life as morally significant, with abuse of innocent animals registering as an augur of apocalypse.

We get an inkling of this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), where, in an aphoristic turn, he insists:

All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.

All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.

I begin here because Blake’s vision of the natural world is a key to understanding Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which takes its title from a line in Blake’s book.

Now, Tokarczuk’s novel has been adapted for the stage by director Eamon Flack, who says the title:

talks about the way we plow the earth for our own means, but that we’re doing it over the bones of the dead and there are many kinds of dead. Part of what the book is about is the way that we live with a whole lot of creatures that are not human.

talks about the way we plow the earth for our own means, but that we’re doing it over the bones of the dead and there are many kinds of dead. Part of what the book is about is the way that we live with a whole lot of creatures that are not human.

By the same token, Flack emphasises how the title “belies […] the very wonky, joyful, slightly madcap, gorgeous and eccentric nature of the........

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