Fringe review: Chicken
This satirical story of a chicken’s journey from small town life in Ireland’s Country Kerry to international stardom as an Oscar-winning actor has more polish than punch. ★★★
Chicken, created by Eva O’Connor and Hildegard Ryan, arrives in Adelaide after runs at Edinburgh and Dublin Fringes swathed in the promise of an international award winner.
The solo theatre piece sees O’Connor embody Don Murphy — a rooster raised by human parents in a world just a few degrees different to our own, where an elite handful of birds make it to the very top of human pursuits like acting and performance art. Meanwhile, the rest of their kind continue to be eaten and violently exploited.
Structured as a memoir show, Murphy spends Chicken looking back on his life, recounting his rise to fame, his struggles with ketamine addiction, his love affairs, and his belated awakening as an anti-chicken cruelty activist.
The premise of the show is full of potential, with Murphy’s life story acting as a gateway into questions about systematic oppression and the shiny distractions offered to those who happen to win at some aspect of the deadly, colonisation-reliant late-stage capitalist game. But this clever conceit is never fully emotionally or intellectually fulfilled.
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Despite a highly-capable performance from O’Connor, who embodies a chicken aspiring to toxic human masculinity in a truly convincing way, the character of Murphy remains remote from the audience. Perhaps this is a flaw of the writing, which uses the tropes of rags-to-riches and anti-hero tales too liberally, giving the entire story a vague and cynically familiar wash.
The humour — always a hugely important element of the hour-long monologue show that has become a Fringe staple — is also flat. Reliant largely on chicken puns and the surreal nature of this chicken actor character, it begins to feel recycled within the piece’s first third.
Redeemed somewhat by O’Connor’s general magnetism, a truly brilliant costume, and higher-than-expected production values in the music and lighting, Chicken might not fulfil its high-concept premise but does instead become a decently entertaining, if somewhat light-on, hour of polished theatre.
Chicken is playing at The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum until March 9
Read more 2025 Adelaide Fringe coverage here on InReview