by William Kherbek // Nov. 14, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
The ghost is inherently a contradictory notion: a form of present absence. The ways in which the absent become present, and those present can be the most absent of all are central themes in Elisabeth Gunawan’s drama ‘Prayers for a Hungry Ghost,’ performed at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre in London last month. Gunawan’s characters are members of a Chinese family from Hong Kong, whose patriarch, portrayed by Daniel York Loh, is being dragged off to the spirit realm when the play opens. Loh’s character is paradoxically full of life as he wrestles for time with the ghostly spirits determined to carry him off from a life of indulgent earthly pleasures. As he surrenders to the spirits and a fate in the realm of “hungry ghosts”—unquiet spirits populating the less desirable precincts of the afterlife in Buddhist and traditional Chinese mythology—he looks back on his own life and those of the children he raised, or failed to raise.
KISS WITNESS: ‘Prayers For A Hungry Ghost,’ Elisabeth Gunawan, Jasmine Chiu and Daniel York Loh, UK premiere in The Pit, Barbican, The play tours to the Tobacco Factory, Bristol in May 2025 // Photo by Ikin Yum
Gunawan’s play involves a number of fraught familial relationships suspended between presence and absence. Loh’s character’s daughters mourn the early loss of an absent mother, a character who never manages to materialize throughout the play’s complex emotional narrative. This originary absence creates a kind of hunger that all Gunawan’s characters seem to be attempting to fill in one way or another. The Father with a kind of epicurean denialism; the Older Sister, portrayed by Gunawan, by means of a spiky veneer of superiority that masks a burning need for connection and recognition; and the Little Sister (Jasmine Chiu) whose easy, breezy achievements and conventional beauty eclipse that of her Older Sister as she rises in the Western elite firmament as a classical pianist. Gunawan’s is a family story, but also a story about America, from the father’s journey from the lean and hungry streets of Hong Kong to a land where food is so awesomely plentiful he feels compelled to “stand up out of respect for the food.” In a moment where the aspirational America his character enters is crumbling in real time, the narrative of the Father’s rise is in itself a kind of ghost story, in the sense of Mark Fisher’s take on the post-structuralist concept of “hauntology.” The future still existed when he arrived in America, his children come of age in a country mourning a spectral future that never came, one that feeds into the ravines of loss already inscribed in their lives.
KISS WITNESS: ‘Prayers For A Hungry Ghost,’ Elisabeth Gunawan and Tang Sook Kuan, UK premiere in The Pit, Barbican, The play tours to the Tobacco Factory, Bristol in May 2025 // Photo by Ikin Yum
It is something of a law of drama that ghosts haunt families; with perhaps the exception of Blythe Spirit, these hauntings are seldom salutary. Old Hamlet’s hunger for revenge dooms Young Hamlet. Henrik Ibsen explored how the sins of the father destroying a family at the dawn of modernist drama in his iconic work ‘Ghosts.’ Forebears look on with bemusement and impotence at the plight of their AIDS-ravaged heir in Kushner’s ‘Angels in America,’ just to name a few examples. Gunawan’s play builds on this lineage but moves out of the western register into the rich hauntologies of Asian myth. The hungry ghosts of this tradition are themselves haunted, by the deeds of their own lives and their unwillingness to change as the cycle of rebirth pushes forward. The early stories of hungry ghosts were about selfishness and refusal of charity, in Gunawan’s telling, too, the self in itself is a hungry ghost, one that will consume everything that comes within its sight. Again, the play’s American setting inevitably evokes a culture of endless manufactured desires and the ways in which the unfillable hole in the soul is always being dug deeper, often with the victims’ eager complicity.
KISS WITNESS: ‘Prayers For A Hungry Ghost,’ Elisabeth Gunawan and Jasmine Chiu, UK premiere in The Pit, Barbican, The play tours to the Tobacco Factory, Bristol in May 2025 // Photo by Ikin Yum
The performers of Gunawan’s company Kiss Witness are rich in talent. Loh is a vibrant presence and Chiu is particularly compelling in her skill and her restraint. Gunawan is commendably absent of vanity and prepared to reach deep into the grit and loam of the soul for her role. If the scenes can sometimes feel long, they aren’t overlong, and the staging is innovative enough to keep the audience involved. Technical innovations such as mixing pre-recorded with spoken dialogue create a compelling alienation and un-realism that suits the unstable ground on which Gunawan’s characters tread. Dance is foregrounded as an aspect of the performance in promotional materials and while this is true enough, it refers primarily to a set piece scene between the two sisters, which is affecting but could more rightly be designated as “movement” than dance. The appetite for interdisciplinary is sometimes helpful, but sometimes also distracting in the play as a whole, as though the anxieties to be “twice as good” and twice as innovative as similarly placed white people that the characters remark on enduring, have bled out to affect the dramaturgy as well.
KISS WITNESS: ‘Prayers For A Hungry Ghost,’ Elisabeth Gunawan, UK premiere in The Pit, Barbican, The play tours to the Tobacco Factory, Bristol in May 2025 // Photo by Ikin Yum
This said, ‘Prayers for a Hungry Ghost’ offers an involving journey into a mind shattered by desire, the great engine of despair in Buddhist scripture. Older Sister hungers for a connection she can never have and so she attempts to paper over the gaps with worldly achievements, then with a kind of compromised romance with a lecherous and emotionally absent doctor. One of the highlights of the play for me was the way in which Dr. Eugene Lee’s character was performed by Loh and Chiu as puppeteers, an example of a truly fruitful interdisciplinary engagement within the play. The doctor’s hands wander, his head at times becomes almost disembodied as he oozes from one area of the stage to another, offering only the things Older Sister needs least. As the play moves forward, Older Sister’s downward spiral deepens and becomes more inexorable—love, hope, time and language all seem to break down, moving her out of the world of humans and into the geography of restless spirits. Some of the play’s strongest elements are the formal approaches to the depiction of her descent, a live-streaming camera captures her face as she unfolds a monologue of despair and loss. Her outfit moves from stage-ready costuming to withered and bloated nude bodysuit. It is a painful journey to accompany her on, but one which asks the viewer to consider if things could have been different for her. Would a connection to her mother, or a more attentive father, have given her the resilience to grow and build healthy relationships? Would an ability to control her loneliness or to let go of jealousies and bitterness towards her sister have saved her from ages of torment? Or, is she doomed from the beginning, condemned by previous turns on the wheel of suffering to live out a narrative she can’t escape and needs that will not be filled in this life or the next?
KISS WITNESS: ‘Prayers For A Hungry Ghost,’ Elisabeth Gunawan, UK premiere in The Pit, Barbican, The play tours to the Tobacco Factory, Bristol in May 2025 // Photo by Ikin Yum
‘Prayers for a Hungry Ghost’ is not a play that offers answers. It is, if nothing else, a play about process, about the permanence of haunting. At one point, in reflecting on her status as a famous pianist, Little Sister notes that “to be an artist is to be haunted,” and haunting doesn’t end simply because one recognizes that fact. One must also live with the haunting, to stay with it and, perhaps most importantly, learn not to fear it.
