Culture

Review of Prayer for the Hungry Ghost – A Monster Facing Family Trauma | Dance

0 Comments

🔥 Check out this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖

📂 Category: Dance,Stage,Culture,Theatre

💡 Here’s what you’ll learn:

toLike many mythical creatures, the hungry ghosts in Buddhist and Chinese traditions – ghouls with huge bellies and small mouths, tormented by their insatiable lusts – are a fertile figure, giving rise to all kinds of stories and meanings. In Elizabeth Gunawan’s Prayer for a Hungry Ghost, for her theater company Kiss Witness, she is combined with another essential character in storytelling: the duo. The play focuses on two non-identical twin sisters and explores, through a supernatural family drama and a combination of theatre, dance, video and puppet shows, the dynamics and imbalances of the immigrant experience.

The girls’ father (Daniel York Loh) has left Hong Kong for a seemingly successful life in the United States, a place where he has never seen so much food. Their mother is absent and unknown, but seems to haunt the stage in the form of a silent background character (Tang Suk-kwan) who occasionally shadows the action or helps with props.

Heads will roll… Elizabeth Gunawan in Prayer for a Hungry Ghost. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Little Sister (Jasmine Qiu) is the golden child, who integrates into society and rises through its ranks to become a famous classical pianist. The eldest sister (Gunawan) is a major problem, a jarring contrast to her sister’s harmonious movements and turns, as she enters into an unsatisfying partnership with a second-rate doctor—a hollow doll with a grotesque detachable head, whom she regards as second only to her unattainable sister—and eventually turns into a hungry ghost, with a black mouth and a swollen belly, screaming with painful hair.

The staging reflects the work’s own themes, using mirrors, shadows, and projections, and doubling live and recorded voices until the words feel tenuously connected to the characters speaking them. The audience becomes involved too, sometimes illuminated or addressed directly, as if to reveal our ghostly presence in these scenes.

The work is part of the Barbican Theatre’s development programme, and feels very much in development: the pacing can be clunky, the scenes are a bit melded together, and there is a sense that Gunawan has bitten off more than she can chew. However, I applaud her courage and vision, which shows the older sister not as a problem child, but as the child of a situation that confounds them all, even though she is the one who becomes brutalized by the breakdowns.

In The Hole, Barbican, London until 1 November. At the Tobacco Factory, Bristol, 18-20 May 2026

💬 What do you think?

#️⃣ #Review #Prayer #Hungry #Ghost #Monster #Facing #Family #Trauma #Dance

By

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Like Us
Follow Us
Subscribe Us
Follow Us