The sparse set is a screen for Dick Straker’s video design, which incorporates overlapping images, surreal flashes, images of animals and, in one powerful moment, the whole video that Janina is watching showing a stag trampling a hunter. But really it’s more like a feverish illustrated lecture which Janina slips in and out of. With Hunter standing downstage speaking into a microphone for much of the production, the performance style feels oddly like stand-up comedy at first, especially as Janina picks off notes of rhyming quotations left on the microphone and jokes about having COVID. But more bodies are starting to turn up, and while there are plenty of paw prints, there are no signs of human intervention. She’s herself a passionate animal rights advocate, who others accuse of caring more for animals than she does for humans, and the authorities turn her away as a crazy person. Hunters are dropping dead, and one woman – Janina Duszejko – starts to think that the animals might have something to do with it. The production is based on Olga Tokarczuk’s controversial and award-winning novel, a fable of ecocide and animal rights set in Poland.
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