A masterpiece on war from FC Bergman: “Guernica Guernica”
Waiting for "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum) Can war be depicted on stage? The performing arts certainly find a thousand and one ways to tell a story, but can they convey the horrors and devastation of war and the sociology and psychology of the victors and losers without being didactic, informative or descriptive? FC Bergman, the Belgian theatre collective whose work I have followed for many years, successfully answered this question with their wordless performance Guernica Guernica, which premiered in the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle from 19 to 21 September 2025, during the final week of the 2025 Ruhrtriennale, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. I will now attempt to explain how they achieved this through my impressions of the performance. FC Bergman chose to depict the war using the Guernica incident. It's easy to understand why. Guernica is the name of a Basque town in Spain where a state bombed its own civilian population f...