Works and Days, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - jaw-dropping theatrical ambition

With the sheer density of theatrical creations jostling for attention across Edinburgh’s festivals, there’s no shortage of arresting stagings, innovative visuals and powerful, memorable design. (Just take Cena Brasil Internacional’s shocking Tom at the Farm as one particularly epic, raw example.)

The sheer scale of the theatrical ambition on display in Works and Days from Antwerp theatre collective FC Bergman, however, might just make your jaw drop again and again. But it’s a fitting theatrical response to a particularly epic subject: nothing less than the history of civilisation itself, told through entirely wordless actions and images. So the stage is ploughed (literally) after being blessed by a sacrificed live chicken (though, through sleight of hand, no actual animals are harmed). Superstitions and beliefs develop, animals are tamed, the physical architecture of settlements is (quite literally) erected, and industry exerts a powerfully seductive attraction.

From pirouetting Christmas tree-like entities to a smoke-spluttering engine of doom, landmarks of progress (or, perhaps, "progress") are evoked in simple but potent images, with FC Bergman’s eight-strong cast scuttling around to create them, or simply using them and working with them in their everyday lives. It’s the very power of those images, however, that threatens to overshadow the humans who have created the developments, or who are their unwitting victims. A later, post-industrial scene where actor Fumiyo Ikeda struggles to maintain a plough, for example, not only seems to represent the old ways being left behind, but also feels like an anachronistic pause in the theatrical excess amid more elaborate, frenetic activity.

The collective’s four-strong team of director/designers – Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck – have devised a staggeringly intricate staging of interlocking elements, weights and hidden holes through which to tell their stories. The evocative music from Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio, too, manages to develop from shrill whistles and drum thwacks to subtle patterns and complex harmonies as history moves inexorably forward.

There’s no doubting Works and Days’ ambitions – both thematically and theatrically – but what’s lacking is a particular perspective on them. Perhaps it’s that very mix of wide-eyed wonder and the menace of inevitable victimhood that contributes to the show’s uncanny power. Whatever the case, the show’s futuristic closing images suggest yet more of that paradoxical mix, as technology offers us joy and wonder, but also threatens our very existence.

• Until 10 August
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