REVIEW: Chicken at the Fit Up Theatre Festival (pre-Edinburgh show)
REVIEW: Chicken at the Fit Up Theatre Festival (pre-Edinburgh show)
Challenging, funny and sometimes bizarre play finds a warm welcome in West Cork as part of the Fit Up Theatre Festival.
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Chicken is a fascinating and hilarious piece of theatre that follows the tale of Don Murphy who, as we repeatedly hear, is ‘a proud Irishman’ . Don leaves his adoptive parents and his home town of Caherdaniel, “home of the great liberator Daniel O’ Connell” to travel to New York where he seeks his fortune as an actor. Don is also a chicken - a Derry Cock to be precise.
So far, so Kafka-esque! In short order, once he arrives in New York, Don meets Paolo, a Glaswegian pigeon, his career takes off, he becomes addicted to Ketamine, wins an Oscar and goes into rehab. Along the way he has sex with many humans (he loves vets) and then with another chicken who is also a performance artist - and we are treated to a vivid description of her ‘pink vagina’ - apparently having sex is difficult for cocks because they don’t actually have a cock! ( I verified this fact and it truly is a bizarre quirk of nature that such a symbol of male virility is born without…such an obvious symbol of male virility). Don is also played by a female actor - this time Rosa Boden spectacularly playing the role created by show creator Eva O’Connor.
The audience was placed in a circle on the grass under the white canvas of the Fit Up Festival Tent pitched on the green by the famous Ballydehob stone viaduct. Don enters and for 60 minutes circles, pecks and struts through his life story. From a performance perspective this is a real tour de force as Boden takes us on a physically demanding emotional journey that introduces and defines multiple other characters with incredibly precise changes of voice and accent. The script is well structured with some totally killer comedy and it asks many questions about celebrity, addiction, immigration, gender identity and factory farming.
What we don’t get is answers or a point of view to explain why the play is asking these questions. This can make the piece feel either as if the writer wanted to make sure she got in a range of topics that felt like they might have traction or if, you take Chicken less seriously, a little like a theatricalised stand up routine.
So we get reflections on a child being brought up by parents from a different culture (or in this case a different species), the desire to break out of a small town and the pull of America. As Don becomes successful he develops a Ketamine addiction resulting in a disaster at the Oscars, an episode that flows easily through the veins of very dark humour that run through this play. But this episode is neatly closed and we move on to something else - in this case avian political activism.
The concept that the birds of the world would unite to protest about the way they are treated is fascinating. In this case it felt again like an idea not entirely realised. Don is challenged about his political engagement by a British bird and explains to us that he needs no lessons in political activism from a former colonial power but then bottles out of any risk at the ensuing demonstration. Colonialism and its long term effects need to be challenged but this was nothing more than a cheap gag that again led nowhere.
The play finishes with a graphic and horrifying description of chicken factory farms where the newly hatched male chicks are manually separated onto a conveyor belt which takes them into a machine that crushes them alive. This episode is witnessed by Don and provides the closing to the piece as Don’s fragmented memories of his first few hours of life return to him. He was on the same conveyor belt when his adoptive mother pocketed him and took him home. He was the lucky one.
Was this a meditation on how much society loses when young people are not an opportunity to succeed; Don was saved and went on to achieve great things? Was it a questioning of the (im) morality of factory farming or a piece of theatre that shows us the effect of celebrity on celebrities themselves?
Chicken takes many disparate elements and observes them in a wry, comedic way using a character that is so much an outsider that he is not even part of the human race.
And while not every question that theatre asks needs to be answered there does need to be a reason why the question is posed in the first place. Right now Chicken is funny and it works but I can’t help feeling that writers Eva O’ Connor and Hildegard Ryan have much more to say about their creative purpose and Chicken demonstrates that they have the writing skill to say it.
Chicken is on its way to the Edinburgh Fringe and is a piece that deserves to be on your must see list for its humour, its performance and that it will make you continue to ask questions long after you leave the theatre.
The show was presented here in rural West Cork by the annual Fit Up Theatre Festival which is funded by the Irish Arts Council, the Irish Tourist Board (Failte Ireland), Cork County Council and others and brings high quality theatre to villages and islands around this area for four weeks every year.
The fact that I was able to go and see an award winning and Edinburgh Fringe bound show on my local village green for €15 is cause for celebration. But also that Chicken found a full house here in Ballydehob and received a standing ovation - which shows that even in the most surprising places there are audiences for clever, challenging and well written plays like Chicken.
Find out more about the Fit Up Theatre Festival HERE
Chicken plays at the Edinburgh Fringe from 1st to 11th August 2024. You will find it at the Summerhall venue every day at 4:15pm
