Skip to main content

Works and Days

Royal Lyceum Theatre

Five stars 

 

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, 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.

 

This is set to a Vivaldi inspired live jazz inflected score played by Joachim Badenhorst & Sean Carpio. 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.

 

All this is realised in mesmeric fashion 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.


The Herald, August 8th 2025

 

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more