Works and Days: FC Bergman's celebration of rural life at EIF is 'all about the collective'
Lauded Belgian theatre company FC Bergman wordlessly celebrate the lost togetherness of rural life, writes Joyce McMillan
There’s no human experience more widely shared across the planet than the transition, over the past three centuries, from mainly rural and agrarian societies to urban ones. It was a shift driven, of course, by the eternal human quest for more wealth, comfort, ease and prosperity, as well as for more freedom and excitement; and every country in Europe and beyond has its literature and art reflecting the impact of this profound change in human culture.
In Scotland, there is Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, one of the world’s great novels about the mighty disruption of rural ways of life around the time of the First World War; theatre lovers may also remember plays like Sue Glover’s Bondagers, set among 19th century female farm labourers in the Scottish Borders, and David Harrower’s Knives In Hens.
And now – with the world facing a profound climate crisis caused by the very fuels that drove our industrial revolutions – the subject of the world we lost during that transition, and the wisdom it held despite all its oppressions and hardships, is becoming ever more urgent and telling.
It’s therefore an ideal moment for the acclaimed Belgian theatre ensemble FC Bergman to step onto the Edinburgh International Festival stage, bringing with them their 2024 show Works And Days, a 70-minute wordless performance partly inspired by the poem of the same name by the Greek writer and thinker Hesiod. FC Bergman (the name refers to the company’s football-team-like ensemble ethos, and to visual brilliance of the film and stage director Ingmar Bergman) was founded in Antwerp in 2008 by a group of six actors who had just graduated from theatre school; and the company has won global acclaim, over the years, for its “intensely visual and poetic” style of theatre, and for shows which – through metaphor, movement, and spectacular, large-scale imagery – seek to understand the huge underlying arcs of human history.
“In Works And Days,” explains FC Bergman co-founder Thomas Verstraeten, “we are completing what we could call a diptych of transition, between this show and our previous production, Sheep Song. Sheep Song was a kind of hymn to individualism, and to that impulse to escape from an ancient way of life and its limitations; it’s about a sheep who feels that it is capable of more, and that it is destined to lead more glorious life than other sheep.
“Works And Days, by contrast, is very much about the collective, the group, and the way they work and move together. It’s about the culture of rural societies where everyone knew that they needed everyone else, and the community around them, in order to survive. It’s also about the cycles of life with which those traditional communities had to work; about the changing of the seasons, and how those same cycles of birth, life and death are reflected in human life.
“In traditional cultures, those changes are not only accepted but celebrated, in rituals and festivals. But just as we lost community when we lost our close relationship with the land, so we also lost the ability to understand that everything has its season; and that this current phase of human history – and the profound disconnection from nature it brought with it – is also something that must come to an end.”
Four of the original founding members of FC Bergman – Thomas Verstraeten, Marie Vinck, Stef Aerts and Joe Agemans – are still with the company; and they have all co-created Works And Days, performing in the show alongside four additional actors, and two jazz musicians who have improvised a score, based on Verdi’s Four Seasons, that now provides the show’s live onstage soundtrack.
“In this show,” explains Marie Vinck, “we really wanted to go for something quite ‘unplugged’, compared with most of our work. Because of the subject, we wanted something that was not driven by technology, but was quite sober, and driven by the ensemble itself, the group of people on stage.”
“Yes,” says Thomas Verstraeten, “and we hold to that very important idea for the first 40 minutes, until some bigger imagery begins to burst in. But in this show, there are fewer references to existing works of art than we usually use; there might be some Brueghel in there, in the visual imagery, but that’s it.”
One of the most famous of all existing works of art will be to the fore, though, in FC Bergman’s next show Guernica, Guernica, set to premier in Germany this September. Based on Picasso’s legendary painting of the first-ever large-scale aerial bombardment of a civilian population – at the Basque town of Guernica, in 1937 – the show will reflect on the Spanish Civil War, and on Picasso’s life as an artist; and Thomas Verstraeten explains that the company first began to work on the idea in 2022, following the Russian attack on Ukraine.
“That was our first inspiration,” says Thomas Verstraeten, “the return of that horror of aerial attacks on cities and the people who live in them, after so many decades of peace in most of Europe. But then, at the end of 2023, the current situation in Gaza began to develop; and the image of Guernica, this absolutely devastated place and its people, took on a whole new dimension.”
“One thing that’s important to us, though,” adds Verstraeten,” is that – perhaps because we often work without words – we don’t create shows with some kind of fixed narrative and final meaning. In fact, the ending of Works And Days has been perceived very differently by different audiences – some see it as bleak, others as very hopeful.
“So when it comes to the meaning of a theatre show, we like to share the responsibility of creating that with our audience. It’s not a riddle, not a puzzle that anyone needs to solve. It’s something to enjoy, and to experience; and then to add your own response to whatever meaning it may have, in the world we’re living in now.”
Works And Day is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 7-10 August, www.eif.co.uk. This feature was produced in association with the Edinburgh International Festival