Review: THE HUNGRY GHOST, Bush Theatre

There’s a constant thread of wanting running through the centre of Mei Leng Yew’s debut play. Telling a story of queerness, ancestry, and immigrant families, it’s a compelling narrative that feels both broad and specific, brought to life with bold movement and direction.

We meet the Girl (Mei Mac) trying to sneak out of her parents house on the night she plans to move in with her secret girlfriend. She ignores her mother’s warning that it is the start of the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, and soon one such ghost is consuming her life – in the form of another girl her age (Isabella Wei). Everything she does, from attending her law job to having dinner with her girlfriend, is swept aside by an unignorable need for fullness, from food and from sex.

Mac is immediately likeable, grounding the play with offhand delivery and offbeat humour. She nimbly switches between playing the Girl and playing her strict Chinese mother and her very Scottish girlfriend Naomi, in some very deft accent work. Wei brings a completely different energy to the stage, deliberately of another world – she combines childlike wonder with a fiendish sense of power and authority, and the two play off each other well.

What elevates both of their performances is Jasmine Chiu’s movement work, which sees the pair sit somewhere between marionette puppetry and a pas de deux. There’s a slick physical language at play, making the possession at the heart of the narrative easy to understand. Particular standout moments come from Wei as the Ghost when she first enters, fingers curling around the black curtain, and again in her final scene.

While this moment and others are truly unsettling, The Hungry Ghost never quite reaches its full potential as a folk horror story – the pacing veers slightly too far towards frustrating rather than spooky, with the first half starting to fall into a predictable rhythm. The sense of the unknown is missing, and instead the stress and fear comes from watching a character repeatedly unable to get out of a nightmarish situation. With that said, Carla Ng’s sound design delivers some excellent jumpscares and moments of tension, as does Cheng Keng’s lighting design.

Mei Leng Yew’s script plays out a winning concept, weaving together contemporary queer life with the Chinese cultural tradition of the Hungry Ghost in a way that sees them naturally intersect. Ideas of desire and freedom are handled thoughtfully, as both halves of the Girl’s life clash and complement one another. Her knowing sense of humour lands effortlessly, garnering many full-room laugh out loud moments, especially when embodied by Mac’s comic timing. This humour is also complemented by Yimei Zhao's pleasingly pink set design, where cupboard doors open to unexpected surprises.

Under Ailin Conant’s direction, The Hungry Ghost is a vastly watchable, funny, and thought-provoking play with a bold physical and visual language. Each individual element of the production is executed with moments of brilliance – but with an underlying predictability, it does leave you wanting more. 

The Hungry Ghost runs at the Bush Theatre (Studio) until 31 October.

Reader Reviews

To post a comment, you must register and login.