“Nobody cares if you are funny, just be beautiful… and maybe a little sexy.” This is the message Dahlia – stage name, Chickadee – has drilled into her by her mother and the rest of the world. Over the course of the show, she slowly succumbs.
To her mother’s chagrin, Dahlia is a street performing clown. From her spot on Trafalgar Square, she spends her days making miserable passers-by laugh, spreading some joy in a joyless world. Portrayed by Feride Morçay with a magnetising playfulness, Dahlia is wide-eyed and pure-hearted. Think Jessica Day with comically large trousers and a plastic red nose.
That is, until she receives an offer of an “upgrade” from a club owner. Mr Nice, who, it turns out, is not so nice, sells Chickadee’s clown act as a promiscuous one. He exploits her naivety, manipulating her into increasingly sexual behaviour on stage and on video. Fittingly, Mr Nice dresses Dahlia in Marylin Monroe’s iconic white dress: both talented women who are thrust into the limelight as sex symbols.
Unfortunately, this comparison was, in part, the play’s downfall. Although the opening of the show glistened with originality and weirdness, it descended into cliché. The image of Marylin Monroe as the misrepresented and oversexualised woman is overdone in pop culture. Despite portraying a story of female empowerment, Chickadee did not add anything new to the conversation. Instead, the show reiterated simple bases of feminism through unoriginal, bland dialogue.
That said, one of the more complex relationships in Chickadee is that between mother and daughter. Her mother relishes in the fame Dahlia gains from being exploited. Sort of like a Kris Jenner figure. However, Dahlia confronts her mother about this when she realises she doesn’t feel empowered by her new character, but used. Dahlia ends the play true to herself, healing the lost innocence of her childhood self and reuniting with her soul. She encourages the audience: “let’s dare to be clowns.”
Although the crucial take-away message of Chickadee comes at the end, with Dahlia and her mother arguing over what the Suffragettes marched for, it was the start of the play that really shone for me. In short, because it was so weird. So weird that it stopped being weird, and instead the bizarre songs and shouts and props and expressions felt like what was to be expected of Chickadee. Morçay had total control of the audience, who were a little confused and afraid but mostly enthralled.
Chickadee is certainly a unique watching experience. On the (red) nose, but entertaining, nonetheless.
Image courtesy of Gehena Ye, provided to The Student as press material.