| Chicken a play with jazz |
Chicken
| Chicken was written in Sweden when Gregory Motton was 23. It was his 6th play. He was living in Söder in Stockholm with his wife and 2 year old daughter. It was later put on in various pubs and small theatres until it was produced by Kate Harwood at the Riverside Studios. It was performed at the same time as the great Ionesco's last play, and Gregory Motton met Ionesco on their mutual first nights. The old absurdist and the new passing on the ladder. |
| "Gregory Motton is an absurdist " Michael Billington |
| In Chicken part of the absurdity is the cafe owner Pat, an Irishman who keeps demanding that his waitress “join the party”. Although clearly based in an English working mans cafe, Chicken's absurdities have some more exotic and real origins Gregory Motton describes that time in an interview with Nicole Brette; “We rented our flat from a very cheaply, from a rather strange little man, a working class Swede with several teeth missing, a dilapidated but grand flat in the shadow of Söder's then only tower block, the Kafkaesque Tax Building. When we arrived at the flat the owner hadn't really moved out. There were toothbrushes and shaving things still in the bathroom and so on. There were two large living rooms with beautiful tile stoves in their corners. In one of them there were four or five cheap wooden desks, a bit like office or school desks, laid out in the centre of the room, and on each of these desks was a telephone, just like it was some sort of office. But the phones weren't wired in, the wires just hung over the edges of the tables. It was all just pretend. (It was a lot like Ionesco's Chairs, which I had just seen at the Bear And Staff in Charring Cross Road, where I had put one of my plays on. Our paths were to cross again shortly, when I met him when we both had plays on at the Riverside Studios, a year or so later). On the tables and in the cupboard, along with other stationary, were framed portraits of Hitler and Mussolini. We had the feeling it had been left like that deliberately. As if our landlord was showing-off that he had a party office. One Christmas Eve he came round to wish us a happy Christmas, he was reeking of Sherry and was wearing a huge pair of Wellington boots that encased his skinny little legs. He was very drunk , but very friendly both to me and Lotta, even though I was, and looked like, an immigrant. One of the friendliest Swedes I had met. We painted the kitchen purple with yellow dots, he didn't seem to mind. I wrote Chicken that Christmas Across the road was a rather dodgy character who took up with one of my wife's weirder friends, a sort of twisted mystic she was, a girl who cried if you used the word “slave”, going steady with this fat boasting pompous rather elderly man called by everyone including himself, Kapten Blod, (Captain Blood). Next to him was a tiny newsagents Stickan's Drugstore (an English title) which belonged to Björn Borg's mother-in-law We were there two years. One day the news paperboy who delivered Lotta's newspaper, slammed the letter box of each flat, as he put the paper through, as if to deliberately wake everyone up. It was 4 am , I was still up, as was my habit. I looked at the paper, the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme had been shot dead that night on the streets of Stockholm, a mile from our flat, walking home with his wife from the cinema. It was the beginning of the end of an era in Sweden. This was also the time when I made my first acquaintance with Strindberg in Swedish. I read, a bit haltingly, Oväder (The Storm) in a nice old broken copy given to me by my wife's mother". Motton went on to translate 12 of Strindberg's plays and win the Swedish Writers Guild Prize for those translations Chicken was published by Penguin books, in 1986 |
Motton , Ionesco and Strindberg
around the time they met
around the time they met
The street outside
two of the
appartments rented
by the Mottons in
1983-86. Motton's
wife is visible on the
footbridge.
two of the
appartments rented
by the Mottons in
1983-86. Motton's
wife is visible on the
footbridge.