Some shows you see, enjoy, and forget. Others you see, endure, and wish you could forget. Works and Days is the rarest kind: the show you see, stagger out of, and then spend days trying to explain to bewildered friends who think you’ve been on the strong cheese.
Brought to the Edinburgh International Festival by the Belgian collective FC Bergman – Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten, and Marie Vinck – this is a wordless 70-minute epic inspired by the ancient Greek poet Hesiodos’ meditation on labour, life, death, and our place in the natural world. But forget the fusty schoolroom idea of “Greek poetry.” This is Hesiodos by way of Hieronymus Bosch, with a detour through Goya’s, Saturn Devouring His Son, and a nod to Turner’s, The Fighting Temeraire. It’s grime and grandeur, beauty and horror, primal myth retold with live animals, industrial machinery, torrential rain, and two musicians who seem to score the end of the world in real time.
It begins, famously now, with a chicken. A real, feathered, clucking chicken, strutting across the Lyceum stage as if auditioning for War Horse. It’s clucking perfectly in time with the live music draws laughs. Before you’ve even processed it though, a full-sized plough is dragged across the front of the stage with such brute force that the boards splinter, shards flying toward the stalls. The audience gasps; the chicken looks unmoved. The image could be straight out of Turner — the old world, wood and sweat, colliding with something far heavier, mechanised, unstoppable.
With all the reaping and sowing its not long before a man and woman are rolled together in a blunt symbol of reproduction. The man is immediately handed a lit cigarette, its acrid smoke drifting into the front rows. It’s a sensory violation, people around me cough, and it’s an oddly perfect touch, the old vice reasserting itself in a supposedly new world.
From there, the imagery grows darker. A massive, writhing beast bellows in agony until a young blond-haired girl is hauled from its belly by rope. She wanders away, unconcerned. The beast is bludgeoned to death, skinned, and, in the kind of reveal Bosch would have relished, contains a naked man. He rises, takes the girl’s hand, and together they circle the stage. With each circuit his body stoops further, time bending his spine, until at last he staggers and collapses on the floor of a house erected before our eyes – a feat of stage engineering that sees a truss and column structure, over four metres high, built in minutes. Moments later, the body is gone, dissolved into the soil.
Some sequences feel lifted straight from art history. The young girl is surrounded by rattling, quivering tree-forms, circling her at frightening speed – the surreal choreography of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, if Bosch had roller skates. Stevenson’s Rocket appears, belching white smoke toward a single light in the Lyceum’s rafters, its steam-powered thrust evoking Turner’s painting of sail giving way to steam. Naked bodies writhe at its base, while another naked man rides the Rocket like a rodeo bull. Goya’s shadow falls here too – not just in the chiaroscuro lighting, which sculpts bodies out of gloom, but in the horror of the primal. Goya’s Saturn painted the devouring; Bergman stages the birthing, with a similar unease.
An old woman in Victorian dress takes the plough and tries to drag it, but this time it will not move. Rain pours onto the stage, real water, drenching the front boards, and she collapses into the mud, a human ruin in a trench of her own making. She staggers to the centre, surrounded by the sweating, naked youth of a world she no longer commands. Then, absurdity: pineapples spring from the stage floor, like a computer game power up. One, two, then dozens, until she has a hundred, impossible to eat, absurdly bountiful, exotically implausible. The epitome of our disconnect from the land and the food that we buy from the supermarket shelves.
The final image is deceptively simple, and chilling: a dog, mans best friend, but not quite a dog, and perhaps not our best friend, staring first at her, then at us. Blackout.
Throughout, musicians Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio are actively on stage, underscoring the spectacle with a live score that’s half lament, half battle hymn. Badenhorst’s clarinet and saxophone can sigh like the wind through trees or, scream like a beast in pain or snarl like industrial steam valves; Carpio’s percussion shifts from the steady thud of human labour to the sharp crack of violence. The sound doesn’t “accompany” the imagery – it animates it, wrapping each tableau in a shifting sonic atmosphere. In moments of stillness, the silence feels just as loaded.
Technically, Works and Days is flawless. Lighting (Aerts, Agemans, Ken Hioco) paints with shadow and haze; the set transforms with cinematic speed from pastoral to industrial to apocalyptic. The house build and dismantle is a genuine coup de théâtre, executed with such speed and precision it feels like magic. The rain sequence is a reminder that in a world of screens and projections, live theatre still has tricks that make your jaw drop.
It is not a polite evening. There’s nudity, violence, death, smoke, abundance, absurdity – the full cycle of life and industry rendered with beauty and brutality. It offers no simple meaning, but instead a set of images that haunt you like dreams you can’t shake. As Emma Hay, the Lyceum’s Senior Programme Manager, puts it: “the opportunity to experience total, unadulterated theatrical joy” is rare. Here, that joy comes wrapped in mud, smoke, and a little blood.
Works and Days is primal ritual dressed in high craft. It sits between dream and nightmare, where Turner’s grandeur meets Bosch’s grotesque and Goya’s horror. It is, without question, one of the most extraordinary works at this year’s festival – a piece you don’t just watch, but survive
Daily 20:00 – Till 10th August
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 7th August 2025
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 10mins