“The search for purpose is rarely graceful,” sometimes it takes the form of song, sometimes dance, and sometimes it takes the form of pickles. In Ruxy Cantir’s one woman show Pickled Republic, it does both and more.
In this play Cantir shape shifts between a morose tomato, seductive potato, romantic onion, maternal carrot and raving pickle all facing rejection at the bottom of the pickle jar, and dealing with it in hilarious, contrasting and starkly human manner of ways.
The highlight of this surreal play is by far Cantir’s ability as an Atkinson-esque comedian. Her playfulness and absurdity has the theatre filled with uncontrollable laughter throughout. It is a careful development of each character for many years, and her own skills as a physical performer for even longer, that results in the animation of vegetables to an incredibly human extent. Till a carrot is no longer a carrot but a helicopter mum, or a pickled onion, a romantic poet. Recognisable figures from all over our lives explode onto the stage under masks, suits and bonnets, while still all uncannily clear.
Where perhaps my laughter died, was in the moments Cantir lost this humanity at expense for great acts of physicality, clowning and absurdity. There are undoubtedly moments where the surreal captures the real, but it is no myth that overdone physical theatre can often end up more infantile than intricate. This also rests largely on personal taste, and it is attribute to Cantir that in many moments her clowning was executed with convincing and comedic precision, just not all.
The character that most stood out, in my opinion, was the onion. The minimal costume gave Cantir the limitations she looks for, challenging her to channel her wild acting style into just her face. Partly recalling the playfulness of SNL actress Kate Mckinnon, her occasional tongue flicks, dramatic pauses and smouldering blue steels left the audience falling off their chairs with snorts of laughter and a real sense of the three dimensionality to this absurd character. I felt with the onion, more so than any other vegetable, a move from purely comedy to a probing and prodding of certain societal norms and behaviours through surrealism. In my reading this was directed at those creatives who use moments of crisis for their own artistic and egotistical aims.
Yet these deeper contemplations and themes of existentialism, promised to be the centre of the piece in the program, were, I felt, slightly lost throughout characters more concerned with animation and amusement. It would take rather a leap of analysis to connect the expressionist dance of a pickle and catchy chorus of the potato to “a reflection on numerous moments of feeling lost and untethered”. However this theme is fully addressed through the penultimate scene when the cabaret is discarded for a dancing tomato massacre. While a more immediate exploration of these themes, this scene comes as a jolt to the viewer, possibly offering a theatrical climax, possibly just confusion.
While Cantir’s themes might feel more forced than woven, she herself claims “Grace is overrated anyways”.
Image ‘1Main Andy Catlin Photography’ by Andy Catlin provided via Press Release