Chicken review

Last August, acclaimed Irish actor Gabriel Byrne told his life story in an astonishing one-man play at the Edinburgh International Festival. This year, Eva O’Connor and Hildegard Ryan’s Chicken offers an autobiographical account of another legendary Irish star: Don Murphy, celebrity, actor, activist – and cockerel.

O’Connor and Ryan – who make work together under the aegis of Sunday’s Child Theatre – have done some strange stuff at the Edinburgh Fringe before. Most famously, O’Connor smothered herself in sauce every day for a month for their Fringe First-winning show Mustard. Chicken is not as out-there as that – but it is not far off.

O’Connor plays Murphy, who is a rooster. She enters, clad in a colourful chicken costume, and flaps her way around the circular space for an hour, relating Murphy’s journey from rural County Kerry, to the mean streets of New York City, to the star-studded, ketamine-fuelled parties of Hollywood. Throughout, he does his best to ignore the horrors of the poultry industry.

O’Connor puts in a terrific, back-breakingly physical performance, never once stretching out of her hunched, chicken pose. She is slyly, teasingly funny throughout as well, almost daring her audience to stand up and ask how a chicken could become a movie star.

There is a bigger point beyond the humour, too. Chicken works as an oblique, absurdist satire – of actors, of the entertainment industry, and ultimately of our tendency to look the other way when confronted with inconvenient truths. It is clucking clever stuff.