Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Oct 3 – 18, 2025
Playwrights: Mary Rachel Brown, Jamie Oxenbould 
Director: Mary Rachel Brown
Cast: Mandy Bishop, Jamie Oxenbould
Images by Becky Matthews

Theatre review
Mary Rachel Brown and Jamie Oxenbould’s Chicken in a Biscuit stitches together a handful of comic vignettes about pets and their humans. It is a playful collection that mostly delivers on its promise of amusement, serving up easy laughs and moments of recognisable absurdity. The writers occasionally flirt with taboo, but never quite bite down; the material remains amiable, lightly absurd, and ultimately harmless. Pleasant enough, but it never risks enough to truly surprise.

Brown’s direction keeps everything tidy and contained, resulting in a show that feels carefully packaged but rarely surprising; a safe bet for audiences who prefer their theatre comfortable and uncomplicated. Kate Beere’s production design injects a colourful vibrancy, touched with camp flair, that lifts the show above the merely ordinary. Aron Murray’s lighting, video, and sound design provide atmospheric support and emotional precision, opting for reliability over experimentation.

Featuring Oxenbould and Mandy Bishop in multiple roles—human, feline and canine—Chicken in a Biscuit maintains a tone of confident control. The performers’ technical proficiency and evident commitment ground the production, providing a stability that facilitates audience engagement. Their comedic timing is deft and reliable, though attempts at emotional depth inadvertently reveal the text’s limitations, exposing a lack of substantive resonance beneath the humour.

When creative writing turns to anthropomorphism, an act of mirroring takes place. It reveals us as a species that defines itself relationally — understanding what we are only by imagining what we are not. Through the animal, we are stripped of pretence, order and normative hierarchy, made to think in other languages, to locate identity in a space far removed from the familiar. Perhaps, at the heart of it, what we desire most is transformation itself — for to be human is so often to long to be something, or somewhere, else.

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