Trigger warnings do not often include references to salad vegetables. However, here is one for those likely to be offended at the sight at a stage littered with the debris of an average Tesco fresh produce aisle. Avoid Trash Salad, Rosa Faye Garland’s perplexing mash-up of genre-bending burlesque, lip sync, strip tease and song, like the plague. Others will either love it or hate it. It is not the kind of festival hit that is easy to remain (or possibly romaine) indifferent to. But if you are open to the idea that humans and salads alike deserve affection and love, you will find it clever, and often very funny indeed.
Garland launches herself onstage acting her way out of a bag, or to be more specific, a black bin liner. Carrots are tied to her arms and cucumbers are taped to her legs. Thin cabbage leaves cover her boobs. She also has a cherry tomato ensconced about her person – it would spoil the plot to indicate where, but your first guess would probably be right. She tapes a courgette to the microphone stand. What follows, in an anarchically random set, delivered in the worst cod French accent ever to taint the VAULT Festival, includes a dance with salad tongs to the video backdrop of a tortoise humping a croc sandal.
There is also an interactive version of the macarena with an audience member wearing a lizard mask, lewd and lustful hand puppets, and a loud birthing of a cabbage baby. Naturally the baby is fed on Heinz mayonnaise, a diet that produces a fair amount of mimed excrement that is handed on to the audience. Quite a lot of the show is delivered partially or wholly naked. Cotton buds are stuck in orifices.
Does it add up to anything? The show has pathos and sadness along with the madness. Often it touches the heart. It has something to say about loneliness. Garland tells us “she is possessed by modernity” a comment one cannot fault for its accuracy. This is a performer expressing herself entirely, wholly, and completely on her own terms. Trash Salad indubitably deserves its cult status.
Writer and Director: Rosa Faye Garland
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