Review: Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, The Barbican

It’s the witching time of year and what better way to spend Halloween week than in a liminal space where the living and the dead cross over: the Barbican Pit.

Written by Elisabeth Gunawan, Prayers for a Hungry Ghost is an extraordinary, haunting production by critically acclaimed theatre company KISS Witness. It removes us from our Western-centric normality and asks us to engage with the Buddhist lore that tells of hungry ghosts – the restless spirits of people whose deeds in life were selfish, violent or demanding, making them unable to now achieve reincarnation. In the afterlife they are constantly hungry with swollen bellies, but are unable to eat; if they do get food it becomes ash in their mouths. 

The play focuses on the ‘Festival of the Hungry Ghost’, which is the one day in the year that these souls can return to the land of the living, and where they are briefly allowed respite from their eternal deprivation. It tells of an immigrant family and its fractured dynamics, pursuing the American Dream and reflecting on their past actions. We see a lost mother, an ambitious but guilt-ridden father, and a set of twin sisters – their competitive history, a gruesome illness, and the spectre of the younger lingering like a shadow. 

The cast of four (Gunawan, Sook Kuan Tang, Jasmine Chiu, Daniel York Loh) are immensely polished, working tightly as an ensemble across multiple disciplines, from dance to physical theatre to puppetry, and shifting fluidly through emotional states. Moments of sardonic humour provide welcome relief from the curious, electrifying tension of the action as the family relate their stories with and around each other, in both tangible and nebulous space. The puppetry in particular is delightfully unsettling, with eerily grotesque puppet design by Aya Nakamura: an exploded figure depicts a disturbingly manipulative character – here manipulated – who is uncannily both animated and not alive.

The aesthetics of the production are evocative of East Asian culture and ritual, yet slip seamlessly sidewise to host the story of an American immigrant family; blending Western culture and Buddhist practice into a form that is alien yet familiar. Multiple interwoven media are used to tell the tale, intricately describing different dimensions of being and understanding, memory and reality, that exist concurrently. Meticulous sound design (LI YILEI), lighting (Natalia Chan) and projection (Erin Guan) all mingle to create an exhilarating uncertainty of belonging that parallels the supernatural legend, while lip-synched dialogue underscores a feeling of space and time being out of joint. It’s visually thrilling, with close-up streamed images, creative use of colour, make-up, costume, props and movement generating enigma or provoking awareness and imagination in the spectator. At times the audience is palpably influenced into actively responding to the tale, while never leaving their seats. 

This is a uniquely creative piece of storytelling that imaginatively fuses ideas of horror, spirituality, memory and being to create a complex space that is deeply mysterious and otherworldly. Blending cultures and unfamiliar understandings, it discloses unknown possibilities, and is an utterly intoxicating piece of theatre.

You can read more about Prayers for a Hungry Ghost in our recent interview with Elisabeth Gunawan.

Performed and devised by Elisabeth Gunawan, Sook Kuan Tang, Jasmine Chiu, Daniel York Loh
Written by Elisabeth Gunawan
Movement Direction by Matej Matejka
Directing Team: Elisabeth Gunawan, Matej Matejka, Sook Kuan Tang
Sound & Music by LI YILEI
Lighting Design by Natalia Chan
Video & Set Design by Erin Guan
Puppetry by Aya Nakamura
Costume Design by Ezra Barnard

Prayers for a Hungry Ghost runs at Barbican Pit until Saturday 1 November.