Review: PRAYERS FOR A HUNGRY GHOST, Barbican

The Barbican has the perfect Halloween offering. With a multi-media production devised by Elisabeth Gunawan, Daniel York Loh, and Jasmine Chiu, Prayers For A Hungry Ghost will destabilise and provoke you. In Chinese mythology, the greedy, selfish, and envious get reincarnated into “hungry ghosts.” Forced to relive their actions until they learn from them, their insatiable, unfulfillable hunger drives them to ingest anything on their path, turning it to ash.

Talk about allegory! In KISS WITNESS's version of the underworld, a family endures tragedy. Big Sister, Little Sister, and their Father dissect their trauma in an intergenerational exploration of the demands of modern society.

Their Father (York Loh), who moved to the States as a young man, is eaten alive by his own misogyny. His twin daughters, having absorbed his notion that to succeed as an immigrant you have to work double as hard, struggle with the concept of perfection to the point of obsession. The piece sits at the intersection between performance art and live theatre, with evocative and hard-hitting scenes. It’s not easy to digest. The stagecraft has an expressionist approach, with elements of mime, puppetry, and contemporary dance that heighten the straight drama.

The nightmarish sequences chase one another, juxtaposing tones and styles. The result is at once haunting, touching, and difficult to watch. Camera feeds projected on long white sheets engulf the scene, zooming in on the performers’ faces to create horrid allucinations. Big Sister (Gunawan) is often the protagonist of these close-ups: her hands filling her mouth while a pained look cuts her eyes. She is unhealthily envious of Little Sister, a piano prodigy. Envy saturates her being and debases her. 

An eerie atmosphere permeates the narrative. Erin Guan (video and set design) and Natalia Chan (lights) amp up the suspense with effective shadow play and other trickery, while Li Yilei creates an unearthly soundscape. Gunawan joins Matej Matejka and Tang Sook Kuan at the direction. Their vision concretises with Matejka’s contribution as movement director, which adds eloquence to the storytelling.

The visuals are audacious tableaux of disturbing discontentment. Its cogent commentary covers a broad area of societal distress, but successfully reduces it to an intimate and personal sphere. This type of assertive experimentalism might not be for the placid theatregoer, which is exactly the reason why they should attend. It challenges traditional form, but remains accessible in its configuration. It’s a meaningful alternative to all the mindless Halloween fun.

Prayers For A Hungry Ghost runs at the Barbican until 1 November.