REVIEW: Do Birds Hide to Die?, Prague Fringe 2025 ★★★★☆

The small, warmly lit living room of an expat’s apartment, a green park on a wet day, a maternity ward, the heightened terror of a child’s nightmare, a pet’s grave, a hellish nightclub, the depths of existential despair… Do Birds Hide to Die? takes us to all these spaces with the ease and fluidity of a dream.

One woman, a writer, acts as the thread that connects this spinning wheel of pictures, emotions, and despairs.  We see her as she struggles to come up with an ending for the book she is writing.  A book that leads her to confront memories, fears, repressed emotions, until her mind threatens to splinter in all directions. Of course it doesn’t help that she’s constantly being interrupted. She’s the single mother to a wee daughter. Her scrambling, mischevious little bundle of joy needs all her attention!

Or is the little girl part of the book? Is it all in the writer’s head? That question begins to loom larger as we pivot from naturalistic scenes of domestic bliss, to stark, eerie moments where the little girl changes into something unchildlike, something accusing. Something that threatens to tear the writer apart. 

The writer’s book is about a little girl. We learn that as she addresses the audience directly explaining the progress of her novel, apologizing that she is so stuck.  It’s about a little girl, and childish nightmares and monsters and shadows.  Throughout the play we never can be sure whether the author is interacting with her real, flesh and blood daughter, or the shadowy creation of her mind.  But one thing is for sure.  The relationship between the two is reaching a crisis.

The play’s two performers Fanny Le Pironnec, playing the writer/mother “Lily” and Eleanor Cobb, playing the daughter/character “Violet” were electric.  Le Pironnec was haunting, natural, and poignant, playing a young mother as anxious to please her child as I’ve seen so many young mothers.  Her moments of crisis, were all the more heartbreaking, since she’d built such a solid foundation for her character.  Cobb’s portrayal of the child really brought me around.  Initially, I was a bit skeptical, as I felt like she was relying on some cliched expressions that so many adult actors over utilize while playing children. But Cobb transitioned so eerily between the innocent child and the strange, accusing creature that I was hooked.

Slowly she fleshed out her stereotypical baby into a fiercely real little girl, full of insecurities and idiosyncrasies, leaving me fully convinced by her performance. Playing a child well is incredibly difficult, and she did it.  The chemistry between the two was off the charts.  Their acting choices were so specific, so grounded in real life, that I knew exactly what every gesture, every look meant. Similarly, their use of space during the wild wheel of dreams that was the piece was incredibly natural; fluid and sensory, conjuring up a thousand different landscapes. I struggle to think of a time when I’ve been privileged to witness such strong acting at Fringe.

The acting was strong enough to sell the show, which was a good thing as the script left a bit to be desired.  Opting for non linearity and abstract expressionism, Do Birds Hide to Die? pitched itself as a piece that “Invites audiences into a shifting world of memories and dreams, blending physical theatre, poetry, song, and naturalism. Rather than offering easy answers, it encourages reflection, leaving space for interpretation and personal connection.”  This would all be well if the script was executed with some clarity of vision, some overarching theme or feeling from which we could jump into the various vignettes and colour them with our own interpretation.  But, everytime I felt like the script was coalescing its vignettes around such a unifier, the show switched to such a complete non sequitor, that I felt the need to do the preliminary work of figuring out what was going on, before I could do the much more satisfactory work of interpretation. 

I felt like Do Birds Hide to Die? was so close to telling a strong non-linear story, but there were a few non sequiturs too many. This ultimately detracted from the avant-garde story structure, as the varying vignettes felt piled on to one another, rather than leading into one another and to some moment of catharsis. The chemistry between Le Pironnec and Cobb was so good that I often caught myself longing for the first scene: where mother wrote and daughter played as “Aline” sung in the background; where I caught a whiff of a real, approachable story that was ultimately buried.

Nevertheless, Do Birds Hide to Die? Is well worth seeing, if only for the vivacity of the actors and the shimmering moments that portrayed what it is like to be young, what it is like to despair, and the love and frustration between a mother and daughter.

Recommended Drink: Pink lemonade.

Performances of Do Birds Hide to Die? have now concluded at Prague Fringe 2025.