The Garden of Delights

In an inhospitable, stony environment, a group of eight travellers step out of a white bus. They immediately begin to explore and shape their surroundings, and find that a cracking egg plays an important part. As often in Philippe Quesne’s work, the characters form a community of individualists who begin to work on a not quite clearly defined project, both independently and together. They draw on the treasure trove of memories from centuries of high and popular culture: William Shakespeare, Georges Perec, Henry Purcell and Roy Orbison are recited and performed, scientific discourses unfold – and in the end, all eight protagonists, brilliantly embodied by Philippe Quesne’s artistic companions, seem to have landed in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” itself. As director and scenographer Philippe Quesne said in an interview with the dramaturg Éric Vautrin: “They propose to believe in the utopia that they are outlining, for the duration of the show, as a way of bringing themselves – us? – together.” Until the group continues its journey after around 100 minutes, they imagine another world for themselves in their dreams, intertwining memory, friendship, landscape and theatre, opposing fear with a passive but purposeful resistance.

Philippe Quesne founded Vivarium Studio as an independent group of actors, artists and musicians in 2003. With Quesne as author and director, they developed pieces where the set enclosed the performers like a closed ecosystem. The group’s productions have been presented at theatres and festivals around the world. After a period as artistic director of the Théâtre Amandiers-Nanterre, Quesne reactivated Vivarium Studio in 2021. “The Garden of Delights” is inspired by the eponymous triptych by Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch and continues the company’s exploration of our transformative modern world and the position which humans as well as animate and inanimate nature hold within it. Which strategies, which utopias can we invent in the face of an uncertain future and radically changing structures?