Review: Works and Days at The Dunstan Playhouse

Review by Lisa Lanzi

It’s not every day that an ancient Greek poem finds itself reborn as a visually staggering, wordless stage creation. Yet with Works and Days, the Belgian collective Toneelhuis | FC Bergman achieves precisely that: a hypnotic fusion of myth, modernity, and human toil that feels as ancient as the earth and as current as today’s technology-fraught existence.

The work draws its inspiration from Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700 BCE), a foundational text of Western literature that meditates on hard work, justice, and the rhythms of agricultural life. While Hesiod chronicled myths such as Prometheus’s theft of fire, Zeus’s creation of Pandora, and the Five Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroes, Iron) to explain humanity’s toil, FC Bergman reimagines these ideas through movement, image, and sound, juxtaposing the purity of a simple life against the brutal encroachment of technology.  FC Bergman takes these themes and wrestles them into a distinctly modern, wordless parable about humanity’s relentless march from simplicity towards progress, and the uneasy cost of that transformation.

At the Dunstan Playhouse, the company crafts a sensory landscape of staggering detail. This is not merely theatre, it is ritual, endurance, and sculpture in motion. The eight performers (Stef Aerts, Maryam Sserwamukoko, Yorrith De Bakker, Marie Vinck, Gudrun Ghesquiere, Fumiyo Ikeda, Geert Goossens, and Gloria Aerts) are consummate physical theatre artists. Their bodies speak in rhythm and resistance, each gesture carrying emotional weight. Without such gifted performers, this ambitious piece could easily collapse into pretension; instead, every hammer blow, every glance, every tableau feels essential. It’s gritty and raw, occasionally brutal, yet grounded in a strange tenderness that keeps the audience leaning forward rather than recoiling.

The performance unfolds through a succession of meticulously constructed images and episodes. Upon a platform constructed over the Dunstan stage, hammers clang, wood splinters, dirt flies. A live chicken (handled humanely and not harmed) crosses the stage, later transfigured into a symbol of life, death, and sacrifice. A couple’s union, tender and primal, gives way to a grotesque yet poignant depiction of pregnancy represented through a bloodied sack tied to a female body, ostensibly containing that same chicken’s carcass. Slowly, a dwelling or barn arises; community forms; ritual and celebration flicker and fade. 

FC Bergman’s aesthetic is one of choreographed chaos alongside thoughtful design. Each scene carries weight because it is scored through physical effort and theatrical precision. The materials of the stage - wood, fabric, dust, tools - are as much performers as the human figures. In various sequences, swathes of cloth are used to infer clothing, ritual, pathways, connection. The result is both handmade and monumental, oddly spiritual in its tactile intimacy.

A moment of jaw-dropping theatrical bravura sees a realistic steam engine descending from the rigging, emerging from darkness like an industrial deity. It lowers into a bleak landscape populated by nude figures, their vulnerability stark against the iron beast. The image is breathtaking, horrifying, and strangely holy, a visual thesis for the show’s meditation on progress, destruction, and rebirth.

Throughout, live musicians Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio provide a continuous soundscape, roaming the stage like sonic alchemists. Their music borrows motifs from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons but filters them through a contemporary mix of jazz, folk, and experimental improvisation. Using an eclectic mix of harmonium, wind and string instruments, and self-made contraptions, they conjure an atmosphere that moves effortlessly from pastoral calm to eerie industrial pulse. The interplay between live sound and physical action creates theatrical harmony: intimate, unpredictable, alive.

Visually, the design moves from muted greys to richer tones as the performance progresses. Costumes and set evolve, much like human society itself, through cycles of creation, conflict, and renewal. Much like the observation that the only constant for humankind is change, this company seizes this truth and renders it physical, emotional, and deeply cinematic.  Somewhat surrealistic final scenes include pineapples exploding through the floor into the air and a looming, curious, perhaps threatening robot dog creature. 

Works and Days doesn’t tell a story so much as it summons one. The production asks its audience to make sense of fragments, to find meaning in the rhythm of labour, love, destruction, and survival. There is no dialogue to guide us, only image, sound, and the instinctive recognition of shared humanity.

This is theatre that trusts the intelligence of its audience. It is challenging but also exhilarating in its belief that silence and physicality can speak louder than words. FC Bergman’s Works and Days feels both ancient and startlingly new, and a reminder that human stories are still being written, ploughed, and hammered into existence before our very eyes.

Image Supplied