Works and Days.
Coproduction Piccolo Teatro di
Milano - Teatro d'Europa, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg
with the support of the tax shelter measure of the Belgian federal government via Gallop Tax ShToneelhuis/FC Bergman. The Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide Festival 2026.
Credits: Direction, scenario, scenography Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten, Marie Vinck. Performers Stef Aerts, Maryam Sserwamukoko, Yorrith De Bakker, Marie Vinck, Gudrun Ghesquiere, Fumiyo Ikeda, Geert Goossens, Gloria Aerts. Musical composition and live performance Joachim Badenhorst, Sean Carpio. Costume design An D'Huys. Light design Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Ken Hioco. Production manager Kristien Borgers.Technical production manager Diederik Suykens. Production Toneelhuis | FC Bergman.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins.
Toneelhuis/FC Bergman from Belgium return to Adelaide with a work inspired by the Greek Poet Hesiod’s original verse of the same title, Works and Days. But in the same way that the company astounded Festival audiences with their iconic The Sheep Song in 2023, Work and Days is also a non-verbal collection of theatrical imagery that startles, shocks, amazes and paints a portrait of human development that is both prophetic and frightening.
The audience is introduced to a community of villagers carrying out their daily tasks in the fields. A plough tears up the stage, shocking the audience with the unexpected as pieces of timber are torn from the floor. It is the image of labourers in the field, tilling the soil. A live hen produces an egg as seeds are flung into the earth, ready for a new harvest. The imagery is rural. Blankets flung over actors transform them into animals. An elephant gives birth to a calf. The calf becomes a young girl. The elephant’s carcass releases a naked male body strung up like meat in a butcher’s shop. A maypole appears in the centre of the stage as the frame of a dwelling is lifted into position as a communal gathering place. These are the images of rural peasant life, a world of toil and ritual, of life and death of love and birth. Musicians Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio accompany the action with a composition inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In place of a string orchestra, Badenhorst and Carpio have created a sounsdcape for clarinet, saxophone, flute and organ, sometimes recreating Vivaldi’s melodies and at other times improvising and marking the show’s progression from the communal collective in the opening scenes to the fragmentation of community, stripped naked of identity. It is a prophesy of lost humanity.
Life changes. Wooden slats of bright colours are taken from
the earth. A young girl stares at the
multicoloured trees of wood circling and moving like members of a secret
coven. The world of the village vanishes
as a steam engine moves onto the stage adorned with naked bodies in a frieze of
adoration. Steam billows through the
stage as an industrial world displaces the agrarian lives of the people in the
village. A naked man rides the steam engine like a bronco urging it to do his
will. The naked frieze writhes slowly in idolatory. The new age becomes the
altar of their worship.
At the front of the stage a lone old
woman pulls on the plough as rain falls. She alone flails against the passage
of time and progress. She tugs in vain until she falls with a scream. As if by
magic the lights come up to reveal a perfectly inlaid mosaic of colour,casting aside the drab grey of the past to present a new age. She moves onto the mosaic of coloured wood strewn with the pure beauty of the naked body. She sits a solitary relic of a faded past, disoriented in a modern world.
A robotic dog enters. It leaps at the old woman and pineapples explode from
beneath the floor. Slats of wood fling into the air, disturbing the symmetry and order of the inlaid floor. A new world erupts about her. Her past is a forgotten time.
Her future an uncertain world.
Toonelhuis’s imagery is startling in its originality. Each image is a cameo, perfectly designed, superbly crafted, evocatively underscored by Badenhorst and Carpio’s musical responses and resonating with meaning. It may be a lament for a lost age or an alluring promise of the new. However one may interpret the imagery and its significance in a modern world, Toonelhuis/FC Bergman’s production of Work and Days stuns with its inventiveness, its visual and musical artistry, and its power to provoke thought and excite the imagination. It is presented by a remarkable ensemble, performing with absolute precision and economy of purpose and action. No action is superfluous to the theme. Every moment evokes a response. Work and Days needs no words. The power of the image to tell a story will live in the memory long after leaving the theatre.
Photos by Kurt Van der Elst
