Cucumbers Cannot Be Analysed

This text is not a review. This text is not an analysis. This text is not trying to tell you anything or explain anything. This text would have come into existence even if the world had long ceased to be. This text should never have been created.

Cucumis sensus is similarly not theatre, since there is nothing to analyse, as is stated right at the beginning. One performer – though maybe let’s say, a human, or perhaps a bred cucumber – occupies a space where only a few audience members sit, with a maximum capacity of 26. There is no point in describing what happened in the performance. I don’teven know what happened, nor have I ever known. You certainly don’t want to know. Cucumis Sensus consciously resists description or analysis, let alone evaluation. 

I almost told myself that it was pointless to write about it. That you simply had to be there. It was exactly the same as living. What is there to write about life? Why write about life? 

I could explain to you in theatrical terms that Cucumis sensus is, despite all that, theatre, and paradoxically even more so than some full-fledged production in a traditional theatre. That this form of staging resists interpretation, and does so consciously and intentionally, but through this emphatic rejection it paradoxically opens itself up to interpretation. That interpretation is, after all, implied and automatic because a human being cannot ‘not interpret’. That it is our blessing.That it is our curse. That the rejection of theatrical illusion, or illusion in general, is theatre's most theatrical method in the world. That the absence of illusion shows us pure theatre. Theatre with a capital T. Theatre.  

One thing I do know and remember – Hamlet was performed. It’s always Hamlet. Hamlet is always performed. Hamlet will be performed forever. Even when useless reviews stop being written, when mediocre productions stop being made, and when we all die, Hamlet will still be performed somewhere. And it will be the worst thing that ever occurred on this planet. 

It needed more cucumbers. 

author: Jakub Tesárek

photo: Linda Dobrovolná