Chicken Dropping 2.0

Aim

We are taking Chicken Dropping, a 4-star EFTTA-Silver play, for an off-fringe run!

We are taking Chicken Dropping, a 4-star EFTTA-Silver play, for an off-fringe run at the Hen & Chickens Theatre! 

A cosy kitchen. A perfect couple. And a war of chickens.

Chicken Dropping is an absurdist comedy about what happens when war feels far enough away to watch over breakfast.

Set in a spotless kitchen in a seaside apartment in Qingdao, China, the play follows Yifei and Ming, an ordinary couple whose daily breakfasts are interrupted by the increasingly brutal fights between their neighbour’s chickens. What begins as an absurd domestic spectacle gradually becomes something much harder to ignore.

Through their conversations, arguments, jokes and increasingly uncomfortable fascination with the violence outside their window, Chicken Dropping asks what it means to be a spectator. We refresh the news. We pick a side. We discuss distant conflicts over dinner. We carry on with our ordinary lives. And sometimes, without quite admitting it, we find ways to benefit from the consequences.

The play is interested not in the people on the battlefield, but in the people watching from a safe distance — the observers who tell themselves that they are powerless, uninvolved, or simply trying to get on with their lives.

At its heart, Chicken Dropping asks:

When the world becomes a battlefield, how long can you keep your own kitchen clean?

[Photo by Vivi]

The play received 4-star reviews at Camden Fringe 2026 and won a Silver Festival Fringe Theatre Award. 

“...A witty and absurd sense of humour… a concrete space in which the play can explore a larger question… Through one kitchen, it transforms apparently distant violence into the sounds, food, profits and choices of everyday life.”

– 4-star, Showtalk

“...Powerful… I left thinking about this play and what people hide behind closed doors and in their kitchens. ”

– 4-star, LouReviews

Written by Dongmeng Chen, a playwright and theatre-maker currently studying MA Playwriting at RADA. Her previous works have been staged, nominated for national funding programmes, and recognised in major Chinese theatre competitions. She explores how ordinary people respond to social pressure, politics, violence, and moral compromise. 

Chicken Dropping is her first play written in English, using dark humour and absurd escalation to examine complicity and domestic conflict. 

The play is directed by Zhaoyi Ying, whose previous Edinburgh Fringe productions have received multiple 4- and 5-star reviews.

We now want to take Chicken Dropping further - to more audiences, and spark more conversations.

Your support will help us cover the costs of developing and presenting the production, including rehearsal and performance expenses, set and props, costumes, venue costs and marketing. More importantly, it will help an ambitious piece of new writing, produced by an all-immigrant, mostly (B)ESEA team, reach audiences who might not otherwise encounter it.

The cost of a cup of coffee could help us pay for an hour of rehearsal space. The cost of a cocktail could help us fund costume pieces or physical marketing. Every contribution, no matter the size, brings us one step closer to bringing the new staging of Chicken Dropping to life.

If you believe conversations about war are important, and that theatre can explore them without always being heavy-handed - creating space for audiences to laugh, feel uncomfortable, and leave thinking more deeply about what they have seen and what they have been doing themselves - we would love your support. 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 30th September 2026 at 11:59pm