Pickled Republic review – a curious cabaret of jarring vegetables
But what next? That Cantir chooses to remain tight-lipped about the culinary habits of her home country is no big deal, nor even the little this show says about the theme of life, death and preservation. That she has so few ideas about what to do with her pickled vegetables having introduced them, surely is.
They look striking. Designed by Fergus Dunnet in Shona Reppe's production, part of the Made in Scotland showcase, they are bold and imaginatively conceived. To play an onion, she yanks a white knitted jumper over her head and reveals a tuft of stringy hair. Her potato is a dirty amorphous lump, its chits growing over the course of the show. The gherkin is huge, tall, erect, very green – and likes dancing.
The tomatoes are just tomatoes and with each punchline of a corny joke they get pulped into ketchup.
So far so striking, but with the exception of some lipsyncing to a witty song by John Kielty and an apocalyptic speech by a baby carrot, she has nowhere to take her creations. She uses clown and mime techniques to illustrate being trapped in a pickle jar, timidly suffering unrequited love or anxiously waiting to be picked for consumption, but too few ideas to justify the length of each scene.
Rather, the show is reliant on the enthusiasm of an admittedly willing audience to slip into cabaret mode and cheer on each new vegetable as though it were a work of genius. Without their whoops and hollers, it would seem a very thin piece of work.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August
All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
5 hours ago
- Times
Prince Harry hates lobster? I live with a basic eater too
Food, for me, is life. When I know I'm going out to eat somewhere nice, I'll look up the menu online and plan my meal, days in advance. Sometimes, when I'm having dinner, I'll already be thinking about breakfast. I organise holidays in terms of meals and restaurant visits, and could probably tell you my life story as a narrative of food. But I've just married someone who thinks about eating as much as she considers background cosmic radiation. I doubt we're alone in having such differences. Athletes coupled up with non-athletes must experience all sorts of culinary tensions. It can't be fun being married to a model, as a greedy non-model, or to a restaurant critic, as someone abstemious. Chrissy Teigen has written cookbooks outlining her passion for comfort foods, while her husband, John Legend, has famously claimed to start his day with a simple green salad ('I have a salad with pretty much every meal'). Meanwhile, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has just made international headlines after outing her husband, Harry, as a man with basic tastes who, gasp, doesn't even like lobster. GETTY IMAGES As it happens, Noor, my wife, doesn't like lobster either. But that's the least of it. She doesn't, unless it's a very specific kind of tandoori chicken, like Indian food. The only unprocessed fish she will ever consider is salmon (monkfish made it on to her plate, until she saw a picture of one). She talks about once having eaten eel (very common on sushi) in the way that others talk about once having eaten dog. On holiday, the hotel buffet is not, for her, an opportunity for a three-course meal, as it is for most of us, she just has some fruit on a plate. When we're out, she'll spend an age looking at the menu, change her mind while ordering three or four times, and then always order the chicken caesar salad anyway. Her go-to dish at home is Birds Eye gluten-free breaded fish fillets — basically giant fish fingers, with boiled vegetables. (She is not gluten-intolerant, just prefers the non-taste.) The only restaurant items I've ever seen her get excited about are the gluten-free doughballs at Pizza Express, with extra servings of bland garlic butter. I know I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece praising Pizza Express, but come on. Even I don't like it that much. It's all about our childhoods, of course, but not in any clear way. Noor grew up in the relatively middle-class setting of north London, travelling, eating in restaurants, and should, on paper, have more sophisticated tastes than me. After all, the things I did not experience on the culinary front as a child included: bacon, coffee, beef, lamb, sushi, hummus, beetroot, Chinese food, Mexican food, bagels, pizza, Diet Coke, artichokes, duck and McDonald's. I was in my early teens before I learnt that bread doesn't always come sliced, that boiled eggs don't have to be hard-boiled, and that salad is a thing. I was about 15 when a mate's dad took us out to a Chinese restaurant in Stafford and asked, when he saw me flailing around, if I'd ever used chopsticks before. I'd not actually been to a restaurant before. But maybe the inexperience made me curious. Or maybe the mounds of Punjabi grub at home just made me incredibly greedy. For food wasn't just about sustenance for my Indian family in the Eighties and Nineties. We used it as a means of socialising (if there's one gesture that best embodies the overbearing, almost bullying hospitality that characterises Punjabi family life, it's someone refusing more food by spreading their fingers over an already overflowing plate), worshipping (one of the tenets of the Sikh religion is that anyone who attends a temple is given a free meal, or langar), passing the time (weekends were spent at food markets, where Mum would spend hours comparing prices at stalls before making any single purchase), and wishing for a better afterlife in reincarnation (spreading leftover food for birds has long been a morning ritual at home). My parents moved to the West Midlands in the late 1960s, and when they weren't preparing Indian food, they were either working to pay for it or growing vegetables in our terraced home's back garden to produce ingredients. When I think of my mum then, and now, it's usually an image of her standing in the kitchen, her apron imprinted with flour, some dal bubbling away on the gas stove, and her kneading chapatti dough nearby, while surrounded by Tupperware. Noor's parents also love their food, and her mother is a fabulous cook who has some incredible recipes from India and Burma, but their youngest daughter didn't inherit the enthusiasm. It's not necessarily a neurosis. You get people who have limited palates because they had a limited range of food offered to them as children. You get anxious eaters for whom pickiness is an involuntary response to textures and tastes. But Noor, like Harry perhaps, is just one of the world's many culinary utilitarians. For these people, food is not necessarily, as it is for us, a language of love, a vessel for culture, a medium for creativity, a connection to heritage, a way to express affection and an act of intimacy. It's a burden. A routine, banal act of refuelling. I can't say it doesn't sometimes cause issues. We're off to Tokyo soon on holiday, a world capital of gastronomy, and I'm already worried that she is going to cause offence by going into every restaurant with a request for a chicken caesar salad. She is so uninterested in food that I've stopped cooking — doing so feels like writing a poem for someone who can't read. She picks restaurants on the grounds of ambience, and often loses interest in food halfway through meals, which means I am scoffing about seven portions of Birds Eye gluten-free breaded fish fillets a week, on top of my regular meals. But I'm not worried. Compatibility is overrated. People put so much effort on dating apps into finding partners with identical interests, when long-term relationships are about accepting inevitable difference, and learning to navigate the subsequent tensions. Also, I know attitudes to food can change. One of my nephews was such an incredibly fussy eater that I once took him to a psychologist. But at university he transformed himself, through sheer willpower. He seems, simply, to have realised that it wasn't cool to sit with your mates, or with dates, in restaurants and order the chicken nuggets with fries. Nowadays, he doesn't think twice about scoffing oysters, or steak tartare or lobster. And I sense progress with Noor. I've realised I can get her interested in broadening her diet if I point out that certain foods are good for her hair — so far, it has worked with avocado and blueberries. And, of course, when we go to Wolverhampton, and my mother presents her with an overwhelming array of sabzis, dals, chapattis, pakoras, samosas, parathas and gulab jamans, she does not and cannot refuse.
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Telegraph
‘I was tricked into eating dog': Travel writers reveal their worst-ever holiday meals
Culinary experiences are often the highlight of a holiday. We're thinking of Seville's atmospheric tapas bars, sun-soaked (and cat-filled) Greek island tavernas and aperitivo hour in Milan. But they can also serve up the lowest of lowlights; gut-churning moments that linger in the memory for a lifetime. Here, seven of our well-travelled writers reveal the worst meal they've ever eaten abroad. 'I was tricked into eating dog' Living in a small Chinese city in my early 20s, I ate all manner of excellent foods: steaming hand-pulled noodles; five-spice smothered meat skewers; thick hotpots; piles of morning glory spiked through with chillies and black sauce. I would eat anything put in front of me – with just one exception: dog meat. A traditional winter delicacy, in the colder months you'd often see – on a long table, alongside other huge plates of raw fare from which customers could pick – a dish of meat with, frequently, the front paws laid across its edge as proof. I am a dog lover – at the time, I even had a dog whose breed hailed from Tibet. There was no way I was going to feast on one of his – or any dog's – relatives. My Chinese friends found this comical: you eat every other animal, they'd say (and I had); why not this one? So one evening, as we gathered around a big communal table, they conspired. Beer and baijiu flowed, the huge glass lazy Susan spun, and finally, without realising, I ended up picking at an unfamiliar meat. A howl of laughter erupted – 'it's dog! You ate dog!'. Wary not to cause offence, I shook my head and laughed along – but the chewy, beef-ish meat in my mouth tasted like ashes, and I've never really forgiven myself. Gemma Knight-Gilani 'It had the aroma of an overflowing urinal' I like to think I've eaten pretty much everything that walks, crawls, slithers or even just hangs there harmlessly in the ocean bothering nobody. (The latter was whale blubber, in Greenland – so glutinously, gelatinously fatty that I may have expended more calories trying to gnaw it than I gained digesting it; the former was 'Foraged Cornish Ants' in, of all places, posh Surrey country-house hotel Beaverbrook.) Only one dish has ever defeated me, in fact: hákarl, the Icelandic 'delicacy' (because 'vomitacy' is not a word) made from poisonous shark buried in sand until it starts to putrefy. Its high urea content gives it an aroma almost exactly like that of an overflowing urinal, and it tastes every bit as good as it smells. Worse still is the texture: smooth but chewy, so that as you gag – and you will gag – you're not sure if it's in your mouth on the way down or the way back up. 'It's ok', said the waiter, collecting my barely-touched plate, 'not even Icelanders actually eat it.' Ed Grenby 'The giant carcass was covered in a thick layer of grey jelly – which quivered as the elderly restaurant owner shuffled it over' As soon as I saw the chicken, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. It lay sprawled on a platter, legs and wings akimbo, its giant carcass covered in a thick layer of grey jelly – which quivered as the elderly restaurant owner shuffled it over. There was no doubt it was for us: my then-boyfriend and I were the only two diners, watched over by a stern official from the Taiwan tourist board, our 'minder' for the entire stay. We were bog-eyed from the 14-hour flight, and when I'd spotted braised chicken on the menu it had sounded so comforting amid this bizarre scenario – nothing like the fridge-cold, ashen hunk of flesh and fat before me. The owner and official lingered at the tableside, and I forced a weak smile. But by the time I'd forced down two mouthfuls, I was in the danger zone. There was no way I could manage another, let alone finish the beast. 'I just can't…', I murmured to my boyfriend. Spotting my pallor, he wordlessly slid the platter to his side of the table and started to work, giving our companions a thumbs-up for good measure. I knew at that moment that he would be the man I'd marry – and he was. You can keep your diamonds, your roses: the man ate the chicken for me. It was so horrendous, that not even the chicken anus skewer I mistakenly tried a few days later eclipsed it – but that's another story... Hazel Plush 'I came home a stone lighter' Everyone we knew who'd gone to Cuba had a culinary horror story to tell, so we played it safe at a reassuringly expensive rooftop restaurant on our first night in Havana. We were young lovers and the setting was suitably romantic. Candles flickered in the Caribbean breeze as the old town twinkled below us and salsa drifted from a nearby club. A perfect evening, and then the food arrived. On first inspection, my chicken looked – if anything – carcinogenic, its charred skin evoking memories of 1980s barbecues. Inside, though, it was all blood and raw flesh, a red sea of salmonella, prompting the inevitable 'a good vet…' joke. Only getting decent food in Cuba is no laughing matter. Having initially claimed that the chicken was cooked, the waiter agreed to source a replacement, which turned out to be the same raw piece of mutilated meat, just flipped over. We left hungry, with no apology, paying only for booze. I'd dodged a bullet, but it was an omen. Days later I was floored by food poisoning so violent it made me nostalgic for Delhi belly. I came home a stone lighter with a culinary horror story of my own. Gavin Haines 'We chomped for what seemed like hours attempting to get through the gristle without retching' Okinawa remains one of my favourite places in the world. This is the island that opened my eyes to emoji-shaped fireworks, lilting sanshin music and Japan 's incredible underwater world. Being adventurous about food meant I indulged in the local crispy pigs ears and purple potato ice cream too – and both were delicious. But everyone has a line. And mine was firmly crossed when I found myself facing a plate of giant sea snails, each bigger than my fist and served in its shell, without a whiff of garlic or butter to mask its gelatinous ooze. These molluscs (also known as Turban Shells) were the star turn in a meal put on by the tourist board for visiting journalists, all of whom were far too polite to decline the dish. So on we chomped, for what seemed like several hours, attempting to get through the gristle without retching over each other. Thank goodness for the Asahi, which not only helped wash them down but also rendered me drunker with every mouthful. Amanda Hyde 'In less time than it takes to tell, there was more of me outside than in' I've had more run-ins with street food stands than you'll care to read about. Worst of all followed the eating of a chicken tamale in a small town outside Orizaba in Mexico. I was seeking traces of my Lancastrian grandfather, who'd had a textile business there decades before. And I was snacking because I'd lost much of my money. An exuberant pickpocket had squeezed in next to me on the bus, chatted gaily and got off with my cash. Initially tasty, the tamale counterattacked a couple of hours later, as I wandered the town. I hadn't booked a hotel, so had no room to return to. There was, though, a park nearby with, thank the Lord, tall, shielding tropical vegetation. In less time than it takes to tell, there was more of me outside than in. I collapsed on a park bench. A young shoe shine boy approached. Could he shine my shoes? No, I said, and if he didn't move briskly, he'd have more than shoes to clean. 'You're unwell,' he said. I nodded, and dashed once more for the bushes. 'Follow me,' he said. I staggered off behind him. Some minutes later we arrived at a white-washed, one-storey house. The young man went in and returned with his mother, Maria. She took me into a tiny bedroom at the back where I stayed for three days and nights, attended by Maria with bottled water and towels. As soon as I could move, I left. Maria, naturally, would take no money. She gave me to understand that looking after people was what women like her did. I left what cash I had left at the local grocery store, that Maria's next shop might be subsidised. And I wonder: if a random, exploding Mexican turned up at my house, would I be so unquestioningly generous? I hope so, I really do. Anthony Peregrine 'We dined in silence on rubbery gizzards' Over the years, I've had disgusting dinners across the world – from fried mopane worms in Namibia to confit of cow's udder at a gourmet restaurant in Bogota. Top of the gut-wrenching charts, however, was a Madagascan Christmas meal at a hostel in the highlands. Boiled more brutally than a Tudor-era traitor, my chicken had long passed on to several next lives. Rubbery gizzards were washed down with 'burned rice tea' – a fancy name for spent water used to soak old iron pots. Dining in silence, we listened to rusty church bells peel as beetles sizzled to death in blinding strip lights overhead. But food is only 50 per cent of a memorable dining experience. That night, my partner and I stayed in separate single-sex dorms wondering who might be first to barricade the loo. While I slept soundly, he was kept up by an elderly traveller farting and ranting about spies from MI5. The following morning, the old man shrugged off his unsociable behaviour, retorting: 'It must have been something I ate.'
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
La Voix is the seventh celebrity contestant announced for Strictly Come Dancing 2025
La Voix is the seventh celebrity taking part in the new series of Strictly Come Dancing. The multi-award-winning entertainment show, produced by BBC Studios, will return to BBC One and BBC iPlayer for its new series this September. La Voix is a performer, presenter and singer who competed in the 2024 series of the BBC hit RuPaul's Drag Race UK. A powerhouse of charisma, comedy, and cabaret, La Voix stole the show and hearts of viewers on the series. With four RuPeter Badges under her belt and a place in the Grand Finale, she was awarded runner-up and quickly became a fan favourite. But La Voix is no stranger to national television. From dazzling on ITV's Queens For The Night, to belting her heart out on Paramount's Queen Of The Universe, her journey over the years has been nothing short of iconic. She wowed the judges as a semi-finalist on Britain's Got Talent, being declared a 'a force to be reckoned with' by judge Alesha Dixon, and graced the silver screen in the cult comedy Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. With her live show, La Voix Meets, she's interviewed legends such as Dawn French, Joanna Lumley, Su Pollard, and Vanessa Feltz, and performed for the British Royal Family at their exclusive New Year's Eve ball two years running. More: Strictly Come Dancing 2025 - find out everything you need to know about the new series Meet the new Professional Dancers joining the Strictly family in 2025 Watch Strictly Come Dancing on BBC iPlayer and add to your Watchlist Alongside bringing a whole host of La Voix's artistry to Strictly, performer Chris Dennis is excited for viewers to go beyond the stage persona and meet the real him. On joining Strictly Come Dancing, La Voix says: "I've performed for royalty, RuPaul and Simon Cowell, but nothing fills me with more excitement (and quite a bit of terror) than the thought of dancing in front of millions on live Saturday night TV. Strictly is a national institution and I can't wait to get started. All that's left to say is: good luck to my partner! Here's hoping they can help me go from La Voix into La Danse." The news was revealed on The Scott Mills Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday 13 August. The remaining celebrity contestants joining the new series will be announced in due course. Strictly Come Dancing is a BBC Studios Entertainment production for BBC One and BBC iPlayer and was commissioned by Kalpna Patel-Knight, Head of Entertainment at the BBC. The Executive Producer is Sarah James, the Series Editors are Nicola Fitzgerald and Jack Gledhill. The Commissioning Editor for the BBC is Jo Wallace. Strictly Come Dancing will return to BBC One and BBC iPlayer this September. Add Strictly to your watchlist on BBC iPlayer now. GK Follow for more
