A SPANISH COMPANY, Bambalina Titelles from Valencia, was the last to perform in the fourth annual International Puppet Festival. Their offering, which played for two nights at the weekend, was an odd mixture of fantasy and obscurity which left me at least, more confused than entertained.

The show is based on a famous triptych called The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch, the 15th century Flemish painter, who treated religious themes with fantastic and grotesque detail. Here we are in Eden before the Fall, then in an increasingly chaotic and corrupt world, and finally in a nightmarish charnel house.

The setting is a large cauldron framed by arced poles. In the hands of three manipulators/actors, puppets crawl in and out of it, are encased in and released from balloons, engage in explicit sex and suggest different appetites and sensations. At one point, a monstrous creature devours a human puppet and urinates on its remains.

As a programme note acknowledges, the triptych presents all its images simultaneously and leaves it to the spectator to select and evaluate them. The production cannot do more than offer its personal view of the painting, using music as a background but without language, no more logical or objective than a dream.

It ends with a grinning mannikin surveying a desolation of dismembered bodies, by which stage my sense of coherence had been thoroughly dismantled. There was much to impress in the expertise of the young puppeteers, and in random scenes which impacted the eye and mind. But I felt that the company had, in terms of meaningful content, bitten off more than they or I could satisfactorily chew.