The Garden of Earthly Delights

A theatre project about the lure of the archaic

Actor and puppet-maker Marc Schnittger, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s late medieval painting »The Garden of Earthly Delights«, presents an imaginative combination of puppet theatre, play and sound world: a sensual and spectacular panorama of human longing.

An illustrious group of bizarre characters follows a mysterious individual who knows the neighbourhood into the wilderness. These pleasure-seekers are all looking for an auspicious clearing where their innermost wishes are to be granted. But the expedition ends up in the swamp of their inner worlds. A grotesque biblical flight of the imagination about a civilisation looking for the meaning of life.

This theatre project hinges around the mysterious »The Garden of Earthly Delights« triptych by Hieronymus Bosch.

1st part: Planet Eden
2nd part: The Garden of Earthly Delights
3rd part: Musical Hell

Sponsored by the Kiel Department of Culture, the Ministry of Education and Arts of Schleswig-Holstein and the Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. with funds from the Federal Commissioner for Cultural Affairs and the Media.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Cherub: Everyone’s having a good time. Can’t you put up with that?
Kid: What do you think’s going on here? The Last Judgement, that’s what!

The Garden of Earthly Delights

All power to the swamps!

Swamped with praise: Marc Schnittger’s »Garden of Earthly Delights«. Wonderful how this round dance shifts between seriousness, the grotesque and comedy.
Kieler Nachrichten

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Outstanding puppetry

Ruhr-Nachrichten

Perfect illusion

They were only puppets, but they created so much life on stage that each figure sticks in the memory quite individually. The audience was moved and fascinated.
Grenz-Echo Eupen

Forget funny

Gripping puppetry to end the Festival. Pleasure-sekking tourists are thrown back on their own resources radically in the heart of the wilderness. Fun-seekers are made to look into their own abyss, apparently tamed nature becomes a grisly miasma of profound fears. A dense and gripping show.
Augsburger Zeitung

The jungle camp and the question of human existence

Everything goes in Marc Schnittger’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but nothing is as it seems. This is all about central questions of human existence. Life-size latex figures presented by Schnittger in a virtuoso fashion live and suffer through a crazy unmasking process. The extreme situation in the jungle turns their lives upside-down.
Husumer Nachrichten

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Tango in the swamp

Marc Schnittger’s garden of delights enchants the audience. A biotope of unreality, absurdity and the grotesque, a world that is as funny as it is frightening, as disturbing as it is fascinating, brought to joyous life by Marc Schnittger, the brilliant puppet-whisperer.
Straubinger Tagblatt

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Paradise Lost

Paradise lost, jenseits von Eden, geschlossene Gesellschaft irgendwo zwischen Milton, Dante, Satre und Hieronymus Bosch. Eine fantastische Allegorie, schwer zu deuten, aber leicht zu begreifen: Es geht ums Leben, jene Krankheit, die zum Tod führt, mit ihren Freunden, Lüsten, Verstrickungen und seelischen Abgründen. Die Hölle, das sind die anderen.

Paradse lost, expelled from Eden, a claustrophobic society somethere between Milton, Dante, Sartre and Hieronymus Bosch. A fantasy allegory: hard to interpret but easy to understand: it is all about life, that illness that carries us to death, with its friends, joys, entanglements and psychological abysses. L’enfer, c’est les autres.
Rhein-Zeitung

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Video

Excerpts from the show »The Garden of Earthly Delights«.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Staff

direction and dramaturgy: Almut Fischer
text | play | setting | puppets: Marc Schnittger
assistant director: Marita Stolze
music | soundscape: Jan-Peter Pflug
costumes: Linda Ilsemann
set assistant: Arne Bustorff
technical set up: Jörg Lippmann, Michael Kern
backstage: Andreas Pankratz, Renate Ehlers