WORKS AND DAYS
Edinburgh International Festival
★★★★
“an intriguing work by a (literally) ground breaking theatre company”
Works and Days, a rumination on the vanished rituals of rural life, has just opened at the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. This show is created by the Belgian theatre collective FC Bergman. The Antwerp based company’s production takes its inspiration from the Greek poet’s Hesiod’s work from around 700 BC. But if you arrive expecting dactylic hexameters proclaimed in Ancient Greek, this wordless, dreamlike show will upend your expectations. Hesiod is a starting point, as the vague echoes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons weave in and out of the accompanying music.
FC Bergman (part of Toneelhuis since 2013) are well known for their extraordinary, site specific productions. The product that they build as part of the performance often dwarfs the figures of the performers on the stage. Founded in 2008, artists Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck have worked together as directors, dramaturgs and set designers. They have created projects as diverse as building an entire village on stage in 300 el x 50 el x 30 el, to Terminator Trilogy performed on a site outdoors in the port of Antwerp. An ironic tone emerges in the work of FC Bergman as we watch the Promethean struggles of the performers battle it out within the constraints of time, space and their own physical limitations. In Works and Days, the cyclical function of farming work is celebrated in the rituals of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing. These processes are both recognizable, but also defamiliarized, taking place as they do on stage in a late nineteenth century theatre in the heart of downtown Edinburgh.
Each moment of defamiliarization is shocking, from watching the performers literally plough up the wooden floor of the stage, to seemingly beat a live chicken to death in a bag. FC Bergman’s talking points are emphatically made. Firstly that these ancient processes of producing food so that the community could survive is brutal work. Secondly, it also is work that cannot be done alone. Together, the audience watches the company create the calendar of farming life. The performers literally build the outlines of a barn, and raise it. They create an animal struggling to give birth out of the actors’ bodies, and pieces of cloth. The cycle of birth, life, and death is completed when they slaughter the animal in the same way. The yards of red cloth produced in the slaughter become a cloak to cover the calf (now magically transformed into a child) running around the barn the community has built.
Not content with creating the world that Hesiod describes in his ancient poem, FC Bergman continue to enlarge our perceptions of how human life has changed over the centuries. Humanity may have managed to survive by farming, but the arrival of the Industrial Age not only produced machines that could do the work formerly done by the community, it began to celebrate humans as individuals. Works and Days shows how the importance of community life recedes. The actors, entranced by a creature of smoke and steam that is puffing away in front of them, peer at its inner workings, mount its metal back, and bathe in the power which is produced not by human muscle, but burning fuel and water. Man is ironically empowered and diminished by this new age of the machine. The point is further underlined when we return to the age of the plough. But this scene, there is only one woman trying to drag the plough across the stage. She is further hampered by a pouring rainstorm. When she glimpses the machine, still puffing away in the background, she goes to investigate, but the machine ascends, out of reach. There are a few more surprises left in this show, which becomes increasingly surreal. Especially when we finally arrive in the age of cybernetics. It is clear that humans have forgotten much that used to sustain them not only in food, but in community life.
FC Bergman’s work is a curious combination of stylized movement and moments where they break into dance. The whole piece is accompanied by music (composed by Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio) played live on stage on a variety of instruments. The performers’ transitions from era to era can be abrupt, and it takes a while to try and figure out where in the narrative we might be. Then there is the problem of seeing a production, both enormous in concept and build, somehow diminished on a stage in a conventional theatre space. It is convenient to sit in a comfortable seat in such a beautiful theatre, but how much more meaningful might the experience of Works and Days be performed outdoors?
This is an intriguing work by a (literally) ground breaking theatre company. If you enjoy theatrical experiences that challenge, Works and Days will be memorable. I’m certainly looking forward to following their work.
WORKS AND DAYS
Edinburgh International Festival
Reviewed on 7th August 2025 at Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Kurt Van der Elst
