19 – 20 May

Four women, of varied East Asian heritage, take as their overarching theme the Chinese hungry ghost festival, celebrated in various forms in several Asian cultures. Each year, ghosts who were violent and greedy in life, are permitted to return to the earth for just one day. They are generally feared by the living, who try to appease them with food (which they cannot consume) and performance, reserving front row seats for the grumpy phantoms.

The action centres around two sisters (Elizabeth Gunawan and Vinna Law) and their mother (Tang Sook Kuen), who makes a powerful speech about her experience bringing up daughters in melting-pot America. She speaks of enduring prejudicial stereotypes imposed on them, which might differ from other diasporic populations in kind but not in essence, and the exhausting efforts to maintain a sense of cultural identity, whilst also wishing to merge into the more anonymous mainstream.

Thus far, the narrative was intriguing as we get to know three very different people jostling for recognition and trying to make sense of their sometimes fractious relationship. One daughter excels at classical piano, to the chagrin of her less-talented sister. But none of the women seem happy or fulfilled, raging at the ‘hierarchy of beauty’ and defiantly asserting that ‘true talent cannot stay hidden’, whereas the forlorn truth is, it can.

The dialogue is interspersed with pithy sayings, similar to the Chinese literary tradition of four-character proverbs (四字箴言), projected onto a screen. The show is awash with effects, evocative sound design (Li Yi Lei), moody lighting (Natalia Chan), and disturbing puppetry (Aya Nakamura). A rather creepy, grey-faced doctor comes to life, manipulated and voiced by two actors. One of the sisters falls in love with him, even though he performs a rather overly tactile examination of her. The doctor has a pointy nose, indicating that he is probably from the ‘dominant culture’. Mysteriously, he too likes to play the same Mozart piece as the two sisters before being subjected to a wild sexual assault, in which he loses his head as his lover grinds into him from behind.

There is much humour, for example, when the sisters recite long lists of their mostly western names, and vie for dominance over one another. Sometimes the dialogue veers uncomfortably into melodrama (‘What do you know about love?), but overall, the show tends towards the arrestingly grotesque, as when a pregnant daughter writhes about on the floor, puffing black powder in the air and crunching her way through glass from the dinner table. At this point, she is presumably a ghost, but the transition is unclear. Similarly, the mother suffers from a stroke, but I was not sure if she too had transitioned to the spirit world.

A cast made up of long-haired women, performing in a kind of eerie twilight does not make it easy to discern who is who at any given point. But with a talented creative team that also includes a simple functional set and evocative projections (Erin Guan) and slickly stylized choreography (Matej Matejka), there is much to engage, despite the lack of narrative clarity.

The flyer notes speak of the misplaced stereotyping of so-called ‘model minorities’ encouraged to assimilate or suffer isolation. But accented English is routinely disdained throughout society. The comic, Bill Bailey, grew up speaking with a west-country burr, which he drummed out of himself, because he wanted ‘to get on in life’. If the ravenous ghost serves as an unflattering metaphor for rapacious westerners, it is worth noting that prejudice is not a one-way street. Chinese communities regularly refer to white people as ghosts (鬼佬).

★★★☆☆      Peter Jordan   20 May 2026

Photography credit:  Ikin Yum