Camden Fringe Review: Chicken Dropping ★★★½

Dongmeng Chen uses chickens and eggs to expose wider questions about how we respond to war

Chicken Dropping starts at a domestic kitchen table in a Qingdao beachfront apartment. Ming (Tristen ZiJuin) has been to the market and lovingly crafted a breakfast of congee, egg and oyster pancakes. Yifei (Clarissa Liaw), impatient and ready for the office, complains the pancakes will be too greasy and demands coffee. Ming points her to the ocean view and his market purchases, Yifei bristles and discusses her work.

Nights that should be at home become dinners with the boss as Yifei hustles for a promotion in the bank. There is a sense that she has outgrown Ming, but we learn that she is from the countryside and dependent on her marriage to stay in the city. My interpretation is that this is to do with her rural hukou status as opposed to his urban one. Hukou is an official household registration system which records which schools, hospitals and benefits a citizen is entitled to.

As they eat, warring chicken noises from next door dominate the room. Yifei is infuriated by the hubbub, demanding Ming talk to the neighbour. Then, an egg rolls into their kitchen. And the opportunity becomes clear. Yifei realises the longer the war goes, the greater the opportunity for free eggs. Rather than passive onlookers on the sidelines, she explains to Ming, they can become beneficiaries.

As Yifei maps out diagrams to maximise their haul of eggs, Ming goes one step further: entering the neighbour’s property and stealing and killing chickens. For Yifei, this crosses the line between opportunistic bounty and actual theft. Ming has not just found something but gone and taken it for himself. Worse, CCTV has caught the crime and the video is shared on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group. There is now both guilt and shame at play. Yifei and Ming do not agree on what should happen next, each arguing that the other should apologise to the neighbour.

Yifei grapples with her guilt, burying and unburying the chickens from next door. Ming serves a chicken dish. But where did he procure the chicken from?

The noise of war that had been outside their apartment is now within their four walls. The couple are in discord and become first verbally and then physically violent with each other. For me, the violence fitted the plot but was difficult to watch. It ended very abruptly with a final brutal act. While plausible, it also felt as though the play had somewhat run out of places to go.

We know which changed things for Yifei, the egg. But Ming cannot see a difference between the chicken and the egg with the same clarity. As a metaphor, the warring chickens and the resulting meals, provide an opportunity for us to think. It is hard not to think of the times when we have each turned away or perhaps taken comfort in our position relative to others.

In Chicken Dropping, writer Dongmeng Chen exposes two very difficult truths. It is very easy to be a bystander when war does not impact you. The ocean view and the fresh crab in the fridge, or the promotion and dinner with the boss, will always feel more immediately important. And once you have taken the morally murky choice to benefit from the spoils of war, that blurring of your integrity can make it challenging to hold firm to your ideals in other areas of your life.

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

You can read the Red Bus interview with Dongmeng Chen here.

[Thank you to the Chicken Dropping Team for gifted tickets for an honest review.]

Chicken Dropping is one of the Red Bus picks for the Camden Fringe, find out about the others :