Works and Days – Edinburgh International Festival review

There are points in Works and Days, a wordless 80 minutes from the Amsterdam-based collective FC Bergman, where it feels like carpentry as a theatrical spectacle. As a committed cast of six builds a structure on the stage, it’s the rituals of work that become so engrossing.

In part, this is the point. The show is based on Hesiodos’ poem, lauding the virtues of life on the land and offering a practical guide to agrarian living alongside its stories of fallen gods and goddesses and myths on the theme of justice and the need for work.

As dramaturgs, directors and set designers Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck turn this into a contemporary climate myth about the need for nurture and renewal, for a life at one with the planet rather than wrecking its resources.

It opens with a plough being dragged across the stage, and a live chicken laying an egg into the furrow created. Animals, represented by men covered in blankets, mate; later, the same blankets are used to give a human couple privacy as they too come together. The resulting pregnancy is made – symbolically – of a bag containing the now-slaughtered chicken. (Not really, obviously; the bird gets smuggled away).

The days follow a pattern, based on order and respect. But then a huge steam engine erupts onto the stage and the humans are in thrall to it, draping their naked bodies over its gleaming sides, sprawling in idleness like Homer’s lotus eaters. By the close, the live music that has accompanied the action has switched from hopeful, chirpy flute to grim, grinding organ, and the stage is darkened. A single figure, drenched in pouring rain, is left to battle with the plough, to pull the weeds from the ruined earth.

The piece is full of staggeringly conjured stage images, beautiful tableau that tell its tale with absolute clarity. Occasionally, bursts of dancing break out. But though it makes its point with force, it seems almost too obvious. It’s powerful but somehow also underwhelming, viewed as if behind glass.