Writer: Feride Morçay
Director: Aishwarya Gaikwad
A Marilyn Monroe lookalike stands on a stage singing Happy Birthday, the song Monroe sang to President Kennedy in 1962, wearing a dress that looks like the one she immortalised in The Seven Year Itch 8 years earlier. But this time, the merging of the two classic images is added to by Marilyn also wearing a red nose.
The opening scene of Chickadee, written and performed by Feride Morçay, is an intriguing prelude to the story of Dahlia, a girl who longed to be a clown and was turned into something else through a mixture of parental pressure, a desire to entertain and be loved, and the objectification and commodification of physical appeareance.
Morçay takes us back first to Dahlia’s days as a street clown, through to her childhood and then on to the moment when she succumbed to the pressure to move from clown to club starlet, and have her identity shaped by others rather than herself.
Through an imaginative mix of costume changes, props, voice-overs and dream like scenes, director Aishwarya Gaikwad helps Morçay to show the vulnerability at the heart of the person who becomes Chickadee the Sexy Clown and how her desire to bring joy to the world is caused twisted and manipulated by others.
Morçay combines innocence and wide-eyed excitement with confusion and a sense of loss as the clown persona is stripped away from her and she is transformed into something she doesn’t want to be.
The show draws you in and provides a message that builds on, and goes beyond, the Marilyn myth, asking wider questions about identity, the loss of the inner clown and the need to hang on to it in a world that expects people to conform to stereotypes and sees success more in terms of money than happiness.
Runs until 24 August
