Between utopia and dystopia, between melancholy and faith in the human imagination, between a seminal La Démangeaison des ailes, a memorable La Mélancolie des Dragons and a recent Malherian Chant de la Terre, he brings together the know-how of his company in a new theatrical saga. The eggs of Farm Fatale incubated by the scarecrows are about to hatch, the asteroids of Cosmic Drama have fallen in the middle of the forest: the show brings together the Vivarium Studio bestiary as well as the author friends, poets, musicians and philosophers who gravitate around the company.

For this new adventure, Philippe Quesne enters into a dialogue, five hundred years apart, with the famous painting by Jérôme Bosch, a masterpiece of art history with infinite interpretations, marking the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Philippe Quesne’s theatre and the painting share the same free convocation of a wide field of artistic, intellectual, spiritual and political knowledge.

Proceeding by accumulation, amplification, diversion, parody or irony, both aim less at solving than at creating the debate, via the imagination, on a virtuous and future governance; the painting as well as the show describe an era of changes, and one can read in them a severe criticism of the human unconsciousness that leads to its destruction as much as the hoped-for achievement of a harmonious collective life. Both compose a multi-action panorama that is as utopian as it is critical, in which the imagination is put to work in the service of a lucid sense of joy and new perspectives for the lives to come.

As in the late Middle Ages, the fable is situated in a period of transition, in the full metamorphosis of its narratives and skills. The Garden of Earthly Delights is the multiple and truculent tale of a group of humans gathered in a place visibly apart from the world and who undertake to realise, in a practical and cinematographic sense, their utopia: a free life, without separation, without distinction, in which beings and species cohabit in good harmony.

They do not distinguish between the real and the artificial, of which their temporary paradises are composed. The fabulous shoulders with the concrete, the imaginary has a practical use. Drilling the ground for water, between heat waves and resource extraction, allows for a derisory Fountain of Life, for example. The natural and artificial elements are both protective and protected.

The plot follows several intersecting narrative threads: it could be the collective search for a different form of life, supportive and peaceful, with its rituals and buccaneers in the service of the cause, and perhaps its pitfalls; what seems to be the filming of a Fellini- style movie like Intervista, between rushes of scenes shot in other natural spaces and green-screen re-enactments - and the distinction between those acting or making the film and the inhabitants of this place is not obvious; and the threat, always present even if diffuse, of a catastrophe, caused by a brutal change in the climate or the destruction of this living space by hunters or bulldozers - could this be the name of a new housing estate to be built in that place?