REVIEW: The Hungry Ghost

Mei Mac and Isabella Wei ©️The Hungry Ghost

A ghost story dressed in pink, with an appetite for food, sex, freedom and the things we are taught to deny ourselves.

The story begins with Girl (Mei Mac), a young British Chinese woman in a colourful top and jeans, preparing to move in with her Scottish girlfriend, Naomi. In her early twenties and training to become a solicitor, she is caught between the life she wants and her traditional Chinese mother’s expectations of a dutiful daughter who follows an approved path in life. Tonight, however, marks the beginning of Ghost Month. Her mother’s warnings seem like yet another attempt to keep her under the family roof, until a ghost arrives and makes herself at home in Girl’s body. Then comes Isabella Wei, dressed in black, towering over Girl with an almost supernatural chill. The transformation is deliciously unsettling. As Ghost begins to infiltrate Girl’s thoughts, voice and physicality, the boundary between the two women grows increasingly porous.

The production’s technical and physical language makes this possession both funny and frightening. Cheng Keng's lighting shifts between the warmth of the domestic world and the darker, more ominous spaces of the supernatural, while Carla Ng's sound design gives the ghostly presence a deep, unsettling resonance. Together, they create a world in which the ordinary can turn uncanny in an instant. The set and costume design (Yimei Zhao) facilitates the play’s nimble transitions with considerable ingenuity, while the movement direction (Jasmine Chiu) gives the possession a particularly compelling physical vocabulary. At times, the two performers move almost in synchrony, as if one is seizing the other’s body; at others, their movements pull apart into a struggle between resistance and surrender. The result is a physical expression of Girl’s lifelong performance of compliance and of the hunger building beneath it.

And there is plenty of fun along the way. The play has a mischievous sense of humour, finding comedy in the collision between traditional superstition and modern life, between respectable appearances and unruly bodily desires.

For hunger, as the play’s title suggests, is never merely about eating. In Mei Leng Yew’s writing, directed by Ailin Conant, it becomes a metaphor for the desires we are encouraged to conceal: sexual pleasure, queer love, bodily autonomy and the desperate need to be accepted. Girl’s shoplifting and ravenous appetite are not simply symptoms of a supernatural disturbance; they expose the contradictions of a life shaped by competing expectations. For many children of East and Southeast Asian families navigating life in the West, the pressure to choose the right career, the right partner and the right definition of success can become its own form of haunting.

This is where The Hungry Ghost becomes especially valuable. The ghost is not merely a device for exposing Girl’s secrets. Through an older story of love and sorrow between two women, the play opens up a more expansive emotional landscape, allowing desire to travel across generations. Queer love becomes something that can outlive the circumstances that suppress it, carried through time like a memory that refuses to disappear. The supernatural thus gives the play more than its horror, as it expands its sense of time and space, connecting private longing with inherited histories of love, loss and unfinished business.

I particularly love the use of the pomelo, as it carries multiple associations in this production: a fruit of celebration and family ritual, an offering that connects the living with the dead, and an object that becomes unexpectedly sensual and poetic. Its appearance alongside the moon creates one of the play’s most beautiful images, as the lovers share shadows and moonlight in a moment of restrained sorrow.

The other ritual elements, including the family shrine, the burning of paper money and the incense enrich the production’s cultural texture. These are not decorative references pasted onto a contemporary story, but to give the characters’ emotional lives another dimension, allowing family devotion, memory and desire to occupy the same theatrical space.

The Hungry Ghost is impressively balanced - intimate without being small, culturally specific without becoming exclusionary, and funny without trivialising the pain beneath its comedy. It moves between horror, romance, absurdity and tenderness with an admirable lightness of touch. Not every appetite can be satisfied, and not every inherited sorrow can be resolved; but the play makes room for these hungers to be seen, spoken and, perhaps, finally understood.

★★★★

For more information, please visit: https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/the-hungry-ghost/

Credits

Written by Mei Leng Yew
Directed by Ailin Conant
Associate Director: Yanni Ng
Designer: Yimei Zhao
Associate Designer: Sam Tam Tsz Hei
Lighting Designer: Cheng Keng
Sound Designer: Carla Ng
Movement Director: Jasmine Chiu
Intimacy Coordinator: Sango Tajima
Dramaturg: Pippa Hill
Production Manager: Titch Gosling
Stage Manager: Florian Lim
Understudy / Assistant Stage Manager: Adrianna Kei
Cast: Mei Mac and Isabella Wei

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