Directed, Dramaturgy and Set Design by Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten & Marie Vinck (FC Bergman)

Review by Dominic Corr

The Royal Lyceum Theatre

In a festival season brimming with bold statements and theatrical invention, Works and Days by Belgian collective FC Bergman stands out as a masterwork of visual storytelling and philosophical depth. Staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, this eighty-minute epic is a visceral meditation on the crisis of modernity, the erosion of communal bonds, and the uneasy evolution of human progress. It’s also, in its own gloriously unhinged way, one of the most madcap and unique spectacles you’ll see this year—think steam engines, live chickens (mercifully unharmed), and a stage exploding with pineapples.

Directed, designed, and dramaturged by Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten, and Marie Vinck, Works and Days draws inspiration from Hesiod’s ancient agrarian poem, reimagining it as a contemporary climate myth. The cast—Susan De Ceuster, Geert Goossens, Fumiyo Ikeda, Maryam Sserwamukoko, and the directors themselves—embody a community whose rituals of birth, death, and labour are rendered with painterly precision and cinematic, apocalyptic flair.

The production opens with a plough dragged across the stage, a live chicken laying an egg into the furrow—a moment both absurd and profound. From there, the natural world is gradually tamed: wood is pounded, sawdust flies, and metal clangs against timber as a house is built before our eyes. The sounds of construction become a kind of industrial symphony, echoing the relentless march of human ambition. But this progress is not without cost. When a levitating steam engine arrives, the ensemble sprawls across its gleaming sides in a tableau of idleness and surrender, a chilling metaphor for our dependence on machinery and detachment from the earth.

The score, composed and performed live by Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio, is a triumph of texture and tone. Inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the music begins with pastoral pipes and percussion, evoking the rhythms of rural life. As the narrative darkens, so too does the soundscape—clarinet, saxophone, and bowed bells give way to grinding organ and electronic distortion. It’s folk-inflected jazz with a hint of apocalypse, perfectly attuned to the shifting emotional landscape of the piece.

FC Bergman’s aesthetic is rich with art historical references, from pastoral paintings to surrealist dreamscapes. The show cycles through the seasons and rites of passage, each scene more arresting than the last. Blankets become animals, lovers, and shrouds. A pregnancy is symbolised by a bag containing the (not really) slaughtered chicken. And in one unforgettable moment, Fumiyo Ikeda, drenched in rain, struggles alone to plough the ruined earth—only to find her crops reduced to black dust.

This is a theatre of transformation, where the collective gives way to the individual, and the land becomes a backdrop for existential reckoning. The humour is sly and unsettling: the final scene, in which a lone figure battles weeds in a downpour while the music groans ominously, is both funny and deeply concerning. It’s as if the show is winking at us while whispering, “This is your future.”

Works and Days is a staggering achievement—an elegy for a world lost to industry, a celebration of communal resilience, and a cautionary tale about the cost of progress. It’s Belgian theatre at its most fearless: poetic, political, and gloriously bizarre; capturing theatricality while leaving you with sawdust in your hair and a steam engine in your dreams.

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