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Pickled Republic

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 3 Published: 13 Aug 2025 Summerhall Show Dates: 31 Jul 2025-25 Aug 2025

Ruxandra Cantir’s cabaret show isn’t about vegetables. It is performed by vegetables. The show will appeal to those with a taste for the very silly. Cantir is a superb clown – her faces, comedy voices and movements generate roars of laughter and completely win the audience to her side.

Will appeal to those with a taste for the very silly

She uses costumes, masks and puppetry to appear as a lonesome pickled tomato who feels she has come down in the world, a lounge-singer potato, a lovestruck and pretentious performance poet onion (my favourite), an overproud mother with her baby carrot, and a gherkin.

Expect terrific audience engagement, outrageous puns, songs and a touch of the grotesque.

Unfortunately, after the deliciously funny sequence of the first bunch of sketches, the material starts to wilt. Repetition or shouting – or even the goodwill of the audience – is not enough to save the increasingly ropey quality of the final section.

Midday might not be the best timeslot for this show, but it has the advantage of allowing any young teenagers who are fans of the absurd to go along.

Hilarious and fresh in the first part, it starts to go off in the second.

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The Blurb:

Welcome to the jar. Here, tragedy floats and the wail of an abandoned tomato cuts through the salty atmosphere. Come hear the lament of lives not lived, watch the chaotic energy of the search for meaning and find connections between these decaying vegetables and your own existence. Be prepared, bring a hankie, will you laugh or cry? Who knows. You'll leave stirred up but none the wiser. A surreal theatrical cabaret for adults with puppetry, masks, and perhaps a poem that promises more vegetables per pound than any supermarket. Don't worry about inflation when there is disintegration. MadeInScotlandShowcase.com