Review: FC Bergman's Works and Days is remarkable

The Herald Scotland

08-08-2025

Royal Lyceum Theatre
Which came first? Chicken or egg? In the case of this remarkable work by Belgium's FC Bergman company, who open the show by getting a real life hen to let loose an egg into the earth beneath, probably both.
Surrounded by the eight performers of this seventy minute ritual navigation through ancient Greek poet Hesiod's idea of the five ages in his poem that gives the show its title, the hen's egg drop is as golden a statement on new life as it gets, even if it does come a cropper later on.
As the tight knit ensemble rip up the land – and the wooden stage floor – with a plough, they build a house and create something resembling a community as they shed clothes like skins with each new era they step into. Wildlife is killed for trophies.
The dawning of the machine age sees a steam engine ridden like a bucking bronco before hanging in mid air like a Rene Magritte painting, When the rains come, a woman attempts to pull her plough through the mud like Mother Courage. All this before the naked Edenites get back to the garden like those in Luca Cranach the Elder's sixteenth century depiction of The Golden Age.
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This is set to a Vivaldi inspired live jazz inflected score played by Joachim Badenhorst & Sean Carpio, and realised without a word spoken. Each scene morphs into the next like an animation brought to life in an abstract dreamscape under cartoon skies. The result is a kind of living artwork based on the land that sits neatly alongside the big Andy Goldsworthy exhibition just opened at the Royal Scottish Academy.
With core FC Bergman members Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck in the thick of things as directors, dramaturgs and set designers, they are joined for this collective action by Susan De Ceuster, Geert Goossens, Fumiyo Ikeda and Maryam Sserwamukoko.
Co-produced with Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Teatro d'Europa and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, by the time the future comes calling as FC Bergman move through the seasons, it may not be as friendly as it looks. Don't count your chickens either way in FC Bergman's meticulously realised environment.
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