insatiable desire
The Hungry Ghost can be read as a story of supernatural possession, of disordered eating, or of an insatiable hunger for love. In Mei Leng Yew’s play, these readings continually overlap where the desire for food becomes inseparable from the desire to be loved. What interests me most, however, is the relationship between the girl (Mei Mac) and the ghost (Isabella Wei): how much of this hunger belongs to the ghost, and how much has been there all along?
Performed at the Bush Theatre, the story follows a young girl who is moving in with her secret girlfriend. Her mother warns her against doing so on the first night of Ghost Month. Nevertheless, she leaves, taking an orange from the family altar and picking up a coin on her way. Unconsciously, she has already invited a hungry ghost into the new home.
Everything seems normal at first. The girl comes go and by between her mum’s and her girlfriend’s. At her mum’s, there are delicious, succulent Cantonese chicken. At her girlfriend’s, there is raw eroticism of lesbian sex. Gradually, affect by the ghost, the girl’s appetite for food loses its control. She munches in a local Sainsbury, almost getting arrested, and later in the midnight she eats raw chicken from the fridge. While eating disorder is clinically proven, this story’s perspective also reminds us that it is well-connected with human being’s psyche and emotion.
In that sense, the ghost is the girl’s alter-ego, an embodied presence of the girl’s own desire which seems to be supressed by her own culture. In Chinese, we have this saying 鬼可虛情，人須實禮 (Ghosts may indulge in illusory me passions, but humans must observe concrete propriety) which is faithfully acted out in this play, where the ghost can act upon her desire carefree, while the girl has too many social, institutional and cultural protocols to follow.
Director Ailin Conant also gives the metaphor a solid dramaturgical underpinning. For stage movements, it is always the ghost, who performs all the actual eating while Mei Mac’s girl standing aside, seeing “herself” eating. The hunger is visible but not its ownership. Wei’s performance uncannily combines the ferocity of a ghost with the innocence of a young girl. Mei Mac also showcases unparallel acting capacity, performing the girl as well as all the other human characters: her mother, her white female manager, a male police officer and her Scottish girlfriend. Her acting moves wittily between the liveliness of a real person and the recognisability of a stereotype. The design is generally minimal but effective. Yimei Zhao’s set makes simple, efficient use of a wooden cupboard while Cheng Keng’s lighting captures the nuances of the characters’ emotions and psychological states.
Compared to the richness of the first half, the second part feels a bit too haste. The ending involving Girl, her girlfriend and her mother fits the conventions of a rom-com well, but the ghost’s own story is only revealed in the final ten minutes in an abrupt and sudden scene transition. I would wonder, if she is both an embodiment of the girl’s desire and a character with desires of her own, what might have emerged had their stories been more closely interwoven throughout? Her history could have complicated that relationship as it developed instead of a simple sudden revelation when the play itself already comes to its conclusion.