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, in Sweden.

I described 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".

I  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