Prayers for a Hungry Ghost review – a monster take on family trauma

Like so many mythic creatures, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist and Chinese traditions – ghouls with huge stomachs and small mouths, tormented by their own insatiable appetites – is a fecund figure, giving rise to all sorts of stories and meanings. In Elisabeth Gunawan’s Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, for her theatre company Kiss Witness, it is folded in with another staple figure of storytelling: the double. The play centres on non-identical twin sisters and explores, through a supernatural family drama and a mix of theatre, dance, video and puppetry, the dynamics and dysfunctions of the immigrant experience. The girls’ father (Daniel York Loh) has left Hong Kong to forge an apparently successful life in the US, a place where he has never seen so much food. Their mother is absent and unidentified, but seems to haunt the stage in the form of a silent background figure (Tang Sook Kuan) who sometimes shadows the action or helps with props. Little Sister (Jasmine Chiu) is the golden child, integrating into society and ascending its ranks to become a celebrated classical pianist. Big Sister (Gunawan) is the big problem, a discordant foil to her sister’s harmonious trills and turns, unsatisfactorily partnered with a second-rate doctor – a hollow puppet with a grotesque detachable head who sees her as second-best to her unattainable sister – and eventually mutating into a hungry ghost herself, with blackened mouth and distended belly, screeching her agonised poetry.The staging echoes the work’s own themes, using mirrors, shadows and projections, and doubling live and recorded voices until the words feel only tenuously tethered to the characters who speak them. The audience becomes implicated too, occasionally lit or addressed directly, as if to reveal our own ghostly presence in these scenes.The work is part of the Barbican’s theatre development programme, and it feels very much in development: the pacing can be ponderous, scenes are somewhat bolted together and there’s a sense that Gunawan has bitten off more than she can chew. Still, I applaud its guts and vision, one that shows Big Sister not as the problem child but as the child of a situation that enmeshes them all, though she is the one made monstrous by its malfunctions.• At the Pit, Barbican, London until 1 November. At the Tobacco Factory, Bristol, 18–20 May 2026