REVIEW: Pickled Republic, Decoy Leg, Prague Fringe 2026 ★★★

A hazy pickle jar and the brine’s gone off. It looks remarkable… atmospheric… sort of like a pickled version of Lynch’s Club Silencio; and a tomato is writhing, struggling in the centre of it all. 

So begins Ruxy Cantir’s Pickled Republic, a self-proclaimed quasi-Ionescean cabaret of pickled vegetables. These include the aforementioned tomato, a burlesque potato, a baby carrot and perhaps most memorably a gherkin-headed being in a suit that dances around the stage like a raver in a Wolfgang Tillman photograph. The visual design by Fergus Dunnet is the standout of this show, it’s probably the highest production value this Prague Fringe, a textured, layered design full of detail. Lighting design by Alberto Santos Bellido helps the visual image, it is evocative and brilliantly concieved. 

The other real standout is Ruxy Cantir’s performance. She is remarkable in this, and carries the show the entire time. The entire performance is conceptualised to flow beautifully, and she is compelling, athletic, and genuinely funny. She’s set up the company Decoy Leg now, and I would love to see it do more work in Scotland – the whole team have skill, experience and talent a-plenty and this is an exciting venture.

The cabaret of vegetables is each unique in their own right, but only one or two of them seem to become deeply existentially probing as Picked Republic promises. A lot of it would be great fun as a standalone piece in a different cabaret, but themes planted aren’t quite developing through the hour. They come on one by one and rarely change in the short glimpse we have of their melancholic lives. When they do go on a journey is when the piece is strongest, but generally the snapshots are too brief to offer the real tragedy of lives not lived.

The last fifteen minutes of the show are the most promising, and it is specifically because Cantir lets the image do the talking. The aforementioned gherkin is like a raver after language, something straight out of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of my Life, as is the recalled Potato who sings a song that could easily be in a The Caretaker album. These two figures, dying after the end of (their) history in the brine jar function precisely because they are utterly specific images that are general enough to let an audience dream with them. By contrast, the onion slam poet or the baby carrot are too prescriptive in their existentialism, and whilst it might move the audience in the moment our vegetable characters are too quickly drawn to realise their potential. 

The strongest part of the piece by far is a bit where Cantir has two tomatoes race each other, continuously squashing the right one to death as the left tomato goes into the throes of an existential crisis. The whole thing is a ‘catch-up’ ‘ketch-up’ prank repeated indefinitely. This simple image is increasingly funny in different ways, and a full forty five minutes to an hour of this could turn into a brilliant response to Gaulier’s Les Assiettes, where him and his partner broke 200 plates every night. Cantir’s audience is intelligent and up for a challenge, and she can afford to offer them a simpler, distilled version of the work where the themes come through in microcosm. When this is the case, when she expresses everything in a single image — the image is remarkable. Cantir has toured Picked Republic a-plenty, and it won’t be this show that goes down this route, but I would love to see her take any of the ideas planted here to their logical extremes.

At the moment, Pickled Republic‘s themes don’t quite come through for me with the gut-punch they could. But Cantir’s show is an entertaining hour nonetheless, and received warmly by many. And there are some wacky, inventive ideas, some good laughs, and her sold out audiences always reply noisily and warmly to this curious cabaret of pickled vegetables, brilliantly performed and designed. 

Recommended Drink: It’s got to be a pickleback. Have a few shots of them after a beer or two, and then take a water bottle into A. Studio Rubin — it’s hot. 

Catch Pickled Republic on May 29th at A Studio Rubín from 16:00 (50mins). Tickets are available through the Prague Fringe Online Box Office.