Works and Days, Edinburgh International Festival review: 'A hymn to theatre itself'

Works and Days

Lyceum Theatre

★★★★☆

In Works and Days, the Flemish company FC Bergman – multiple award winners for their intensely visual epic theatre – offer us their vision of the story of humankind, so far. It’s a show without words, both beautiful and poetic, if – at times – slightly predictable in its post-modern pessimism; and it begins, for perhaps the first 40 minutes, with a powerful evocation of the life of a hard-working farming community, before the industrial revolution.

So there is ploughing and sowing, seedtime and harvest, the killing of a big old beast for its blood and meat. A barn is raised, a horse gives birth to a foal, a newly handfasted couple conceive a child, cheered on by the whole community. The image is of a life that is hard, but lived in harmony with the cycles of nature, and in deep intimacy with other humans; the music of musicians Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio, who accompany the show live throughout, is all simple birdsong pipes, and the occasional bang of a drum.

READ MORE: Works and Days: FC Bergman's celebration of rural life at EIF is 'all about the collective'

Then something goes wrong, in the shape of six towering corn-doll type figures - money? war? religion gone wrong? - that distract the people. There is a powerful, discordant jazz solo; the machine age arrives, and there is idleness, and worship of the machine.

And then there is the final sequence, where the oldest woman of the group – the wonderful Japanese-Flemish actress Fumiyo Ikeda – struggles and fails unforgettably, in drenching rain, to plough the dying land alone. In her despair, though, she sees the machine age end at last; and finally sits in a devastated landscape, accompanied only by a passing robot dog.

The closing act of the show, in other words, is perhaps less clear in its mood and purpose than the earlier scenes.Yet Works and Days is a completely absorbing show, so full of food for thought that its 70 minutes seem to pass in half the time. And intentionally or not, it also emerges as a hymn to theatre itself; an art-form where human beings often still work together, intensely, physically and in real time, to create something worth building, to celebrate it together, and to look to the future, whatever it may bring.

Until 10 August

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