Camden Fringe: Dongmeng Chen on Chicken Dropping

RADA playwright Dongmeng Chen talks bystanders, black comedy and an all-ESEA creative team ahead of her Camden Fringe premiere

Chicken Dropping, a dark absurdist comedy from company TheChorus, has its world premiere at Camden Fringe 2026 this August. Set around a kitchen table in Qingdao, it follows a “perfect couple” whose breakfasts are increasingly interrupted by the neighbours’ warring chickens, feathers, eggs and all, until the war outside the window becomes impossible to ignore. Writer Dongmeng Chen is currently studying playwriting at RADA, and answered a few questions for us ahead of the show’s run at the Etcetera Theatre.

Red Bus: The play grew out of watching a friend return to a city under bombardment during the conflict in Iran. How did that experience turn into the specific image of warring chickens seen through a kitchen window?

Dongmeng Chen: When my friend left London to go back home to Iran, I suddenly found myself following this war much more closely than I ever had. But like most people, everything I knew came from the news and social media. It felt like most of us were watching and talking about a war from behind a pane of glass. And what really shocked me was the comment sections. I could hardly find any disgust at the war itself, or any grief for the lives and culture being destroyed. Instead it was all people showing off their own “peaceful, happy lives”, plus the aggressive keyboard warmongers, usually with very strong political positions. I stripped that political layer away in the play and went for something more universal: the fanatical way people chase their own interests.

Through the screen, what I felt was a gaze coming from high above. Scrutiny, indifference, sometimes plain contempt. You could tell those commenters didn’t really see the people living through the war as human beings like themselves. So I started wondering: what does it feel like from below? You look up, enormous humans brush past you, some feet nearly land on your head. And that image took me straight back to my childhood, to New Year’s at my grandparents’ house, and the roosters and hens in their courtyard, watching the humans above them while they waited to be slaughtered.

Red Bus: You’ve said you didn’t want to write about heroes or victims, but about bystanders. What drew you to comedy, rather than a more direct or sober approach, as the way into that idea?

Dongmeng Chen: Comedy is simply the language I know and trust the best. In high school I went through a rather low period under huge academic pressure, and what pulled me out of it was Xiangsheng, traditional Chinese two-person comedy. It’s a bit like stand-up, but done as a double act, and it carries a huge amount of traditional Chinese culture in it. That’s how I fell in love with comedy. At university I worked as a Xiangsheng performer and writer, which deepened the connection. So when the idea for this play showed up, comedy was the first form of theatre I thought of.

Also, my favourite piece of writing about war is C.P. Taylor’s Good, which happens to be exactly this kind of story: an ordinary man getting swept along, step by step, by his times. It’s heartbreaking. But heavy tragedy is already the mainstream of anti-war work, and there’s no shortage of openly didactic pieces either. I wanted to try a different way in. Looking around us, the economy’s going downhill, the political climate is turning conservative, and everyone’s under real pressure just getting through their lives. Even with a topic as heavy as war, maybe especially with a topic this heavy, letting the audience relax and laugh felt important and necessary to me.

Red Bus: The play is rooted in a specific domestic setting in Qingdao, but you’ve said the questions reach beyond one country or one war. How did you balance keeping the specifics grounded while wanting the themes to travel?

Dongmeng Chen: I don’t believe cultural differences run deeper than what we share. Modern biology, anthropology and linguistics have pretty much given up on sorting human individuals by some biological essence. Languages, identities and social structures differ hugely, but our basic emotional equipment, and the basic experience of being alive, are the same.

So when I wrote, I only really worried about two things. One, to set the story somewhere I know inside out, so it stays solid and real. Two, build the characters around emotions and dilemmas people share everywhere. In any society you’ll find people willing to give up everything for a quiet, stable life, and people who’ll be stopped by nothing to get what they want. Everyone loves, everyone fears, everyone has been greedy and everyone has been content. That feels like human nature to me, not the product of any single culture. So I believe that if I can get my characters’ joys and sorrows across clearly enough, the audience will feel for them, and won’t be shut out by an unfamiliar culture and society.

The unfamiliar setting might even be an advantage. Most anti-war stories that reach a British audience come through a “Western” lens. Putting this one in a family kitchen in Qingdao invites people to step outside that frame, and makes it easier to see that the play isn’t describing one particular society’s problem. It’s something in human nature, everywhere.

Red Bus: You’re currently studying playwriting at RADA. Has that changed how you think about writing East Asian lives and stories for a UK stage and audience?

Dongmeng Chen: RADA has changed me a lot. My tutor Paul Sirett keeps saying the same three words to me: push it further. Growing up, I’d developed this unconscious habit as a writer: I’d polish a story until it was softer and prettier, tucking the sharp edges in, keeping everything inside a range that felt safe and presentable. Paul kept encouraging me to put that habit down, to look past being “mild” and “beautified” for something with real dramatic force, and to put the true, complete lives of ordinary Chinese people in front of a British audience exactly as they are. For me that’s a brand new kind of freedom. I’m still learning what to do with it.

Also, I found more fun writing during my time at RADA. I’ve become obsessed with tiny technical details, like the way Shakespeare let two characters share one line of verse, staggered on the page, so you can see the rhythm of an argument before anyone opens their mouth. Picking up tools like that, from a tradition so far from the one I grew up in, is one of the quiet joys of the course.

Red Bus: What has it been like bringing an all-ESEA creative team together for the show’s world premiere at Camden Fringe?

Dongmeng Chen: For me, the biggest thing has been trust. I trust every colleague on this team, and that’s why my hopes for this production are so high. Everyone has been seriously professional, and underneath that we share a deep bond: we all come from ESEA cultures, we know them from the inside, and we draw real confidence from them.

My ambition is to push back against the “Asian fantasy”. I hope that after watching this play, when people next think of Asia, it won’t just be the postcard images, the neon in Hong Kong, the lights and anime of Tokyo. I hope they’ll see the people who actually live there. People who, like Londoners, lead real and sometimes awkward, hard-pressed lives at home and at work. Who carry the same worries and the same joys. Who go through the most ordinary love and hate, birth and ageing, sickness and death that any life holds.

Chicken Dropping runs at the Etcetera Theatre on 17 and 18 August as part of Camden Fringe 2026.

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