Chickens
★★★★☆ Relentlessly ambitious
theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39): Mon 18 – Sat 23Aug 2025
Review by Salvador Kent
Jay and Weronika are returning from holiday as Chickens opens. The pandemic looms like a bad dream. And they soon begin a descent into poultry-fuelled domestic madness that goes to the heart of heterosexual dynamics.
Monika Klisch’s text would seem to be played by rote, at least on the surface. Yet underneath, the economy of its setup it is relentlessly ambitious. It is, at once, a play about men and women, about childbirth, the pandemic and its aftermath, contemporary inter-personal relationships, the immigrant experience and urban life.
Owen Whitelaw and Paulina Szarek in Chickens. Pic: Instagram.
These topics are all delivered through a relationship dynamic which is exhausted and exhausting by design – a text working at the limits of domestic tragedy with a unique absurdist flavour.
Ben Harrison directs with intelligence. The characters deceive you at first – you think this is a ten-a-penny drama about incompatible relationships. But then Owen Whitelaw, as Jay, starts to dress up as a Chicken, and the play slowly starts to abandon the naturalistic form.
At one point Whitelaw screams with horrific violence before snapping straight back into a smile.
Paulina Szarek as Weronika is definitely a straight-man in this dynamic, but she performs the role with pathos and intelligence. Weronika’s experience as an immigrant is conveyed as the cornerstone of the piece. The absurd British obsession with gardens, DIY and domestic life is perfectly encapsulated in Jay’s obsession with raising chickens.
This absurd conceit is the perfect Verfremdungseffekt – Brecht’s “alienation effect – to allow a British audience to identify with foreignness.
Owen Whitelaw and Paulina Szarek in Chickens. Pic: Instagram.
Laura Bachman’s set is another large part of why the piece functions so well. Everything in Jay and Weronika’s flat is made out of cardboard — from the bed, computer monitor and the sofa to mobile phones and the bottles of wine.
Cardboard is an impermanent material, an easily perishable foundation and the perfect encapsulation of the play’s central relationship. This is also an effective distancing effect that draws the audience into the weirdness of the play’s second half.
Running at a swift hour, there is a feeling the text had some unfinished business. A more acutely absurd version of this work, where even the couple’s central relationship feels directed by an alien, might unlock an extra layer of potential for a text brimming with it.
That being said, Chickens is a brilliant work — simultaneously an interrogation of absurdly stuffy British theatrical conventions, and absurdly stuffy British forms of life. It is directed with a great deal of intelligence and ultimately convinces and compels. This production merits further life.
Running time: One hour (no interval).
theSpace on the Mile (Space 1), 80 High Street EH1 1TH (Venue 39).
Monday 18 – Saturday 23 August 2025.
Daily (CAVEAT): 9.45pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Production website: chickens-fringe-2025
Facebook: @ChickensPlay
Instagram: @chickens.fringe.2025
Owen Whitelaw and Paulina Szarek in Chickens. Pic: Instagram.
ENDS
