The Pit, Barbican, London
Elisabeth Gunawan’s mythological horror blends puppetry, dance, theatre and film to explore the effects of a family’s relocation from Hong Kong to the USLike so many mythic creatures, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist and Chinese traditions – ghouls with huge stomachs and small mouths, tormented by their own insatiable appetites – is a fecund figure, giving rise to all sorts of stories and meanings. In Elisabeth Gunawan’s Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, for her theatre company Kiss Witness, it is folded in with another staple figure of storytelling: the double. The play centres on non-identical twin sisters and explores, through a supernatural family drama and a mix of theatre, dance, video and puppetry, the dynamics and dysfunctions of the immigrant experience.The girls’ father (Daniel York Loh) has left Hong Kong to forge an apparently successful life in the US, a place where he has never seen so much food. Their mother is absent and unidentified, but seems to haunt the stage in the form of a silent background figure (Tang Sook Kuan) who sometimes shadows the action or helps with props. Continue reading...
Thursday 30 October 2025
theguardian - 8 hours ago
Prayers for a Hungry Ghost review – a monster take on family trauma
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