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The Herald Scotland
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Review: FC Bergman's Works and Days is remarkable
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. Read More: 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. To purchase tickets for the festivals, please click here
Spectator
28-05-2025
- General
- Spectator
Why did the ancient Greeks have so many gods?
Writing in a lesser organ, Matthew Parris wondered whether most ancient Greeks 'really, sincerely, did believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods'. Belief in a single god was at that time limited to two peoples: Jews and Zoroastrians (and Egyptians once, briefly). To everyone else, perhaps the sheer variety of the world, the extraordinary generative power of nature and the impossibility of making secure predictions about anything suggested a multitude of powers at work. Since it was obvious that earth and sky combined to control nature – man's only resource – it was not unreasonable for the ancient Greeks to see those features as the first two gods and then, constructing them as a human couple (the family being such a central Greek concern), to assume they generated not only other gods but the whole physical world too. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) named more than 300 such gods, from Zeus and the Olympian gods at the top to Night, Day, Sleep, Oceans, Mountains, Rivers, Winds, Hades and so on, all with different functions. Result: you name a feature of human life, there was probably a god for it, all the way down to gods of weeding, muck-spreading, reaping and mildew. But what did those gods require? Obviously, what humans required, that is, respect, in the shape of acknowledgement. That could consist of a prayer, an offering left on an altar, or (at the communal level) a hecatomb (100 oxen sacrifice). And what did humans hope for in return? Primarily, the means of life, especially 'the blessings of the gods visited on them, for ploughing and for harvest, each in its season, with unbroken regularity' (Isocrates). That was achieved as long as the rituals were properly carried out – the sole function of priests, male and female. But if, say, Athenians felt that the gods could help their political ambitions, that was something for the democratic assembly to discuss.
