Get ready for some truly unsettling theatre this Halloween. Award-winning company KISS WITNESS, led by the fierce Elisabeth Gunawan, is bringing its world premiere of Prayers for a Hungry Ghost to The Pit at the Barbican from October 29 to November 1. Forget standard spooky season fare; this one’s going to stick with you.
This production is supported by a commission from Kakilang, a cross-arts organisation that champions world-class East and Southeast Asian artists.
The show is a family drama set in a nightmarish underworld—the realm of hungry ghosts. In Chinese mythology, these spirits were greedy or violent in their past lives. Here, that idea is used to explore a very real, very painful subject: the inherited pressures of the migrant experience.
You’ll watch a migrant family face the actual price of chasing the “American dream.” The father, who escaped poverty in Hong Kong to find capitalist success, struggles while his two daughters spiral in opposite directions. One becomes a piano prodigy; the other is consumed by a strange illness. It all leads them to the same insatiable pit of hunger.
Horror and the ‘Model Minority’ Myth
The play is performed by an all-East Asian cast and created by a female-led, majority East and Southeast Asian team. They blend horror, physical performance, live cinema, and dark comedy. It’s inventive, critically acclaimed work.
KISS WITNESS uses the horror genre to expose the intergenerational trauma that often hides behind the “model minority” stereotype. That myth, which praises certain migrants for success, is a lie. It ignores systemic racism and makes entire communities feel invisible.
As Gunawan puts it, the company exists “to harness the power of theatre to create spaces of belonging for people who don’t have it in real life.”
Read More: Dam Van Huynh’s Exquisite Noise to Premiere at The Place, LondonShe stresses that this isn’t simply a ghostly play. “Here, ghosts and hauntings are more than tropes in the horror genre, but a manifestation of absences and erasures in history,” she says. “I want the piece to make visible a worldview that has been historically marginalised to present East and Southeast Asian people as idiosyncratic human beings with fears, desires and fallibilities. This is the story of my family, and of many migrant families.”
The performance shifts between English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Malay, with surtitles provided. It’s challenging, cathartic, and completely vital.
See the World Premiere
Don’t miss this run. It’s short, running for just five performances.
Toni Racklin, Barbican Head of Theatre & Dance, says the work “delves into timely questions of identity, belonging and historical erasure with ferocity and compassion.” You know you want to see that.
Ready to book? Go get your ticket now! They start at £20, and Young Barbican tickets are £10.
Photographer credit: Genevive Reeves
