The Hungry Ghost review – this sexy, juicily spooky romcom is a scream

With shapeshifting performances and smart, heartfelt writing, Mei Leng Yew’s juicily spooky romcom is a seductively assured debut about second-generation family dynamics, the all-in nature of a new relationship, and the internal battles of a young woman trying to work out what she wants.

You must not make any big decisions during the traditional Chinese Ghost festival, our protagonist’s mum warns, or else the hungry ghosts will get you. But Girl (My Neighbour Totoro’s Mei Mac) already has her bags packed to move in with her secret girlfriend of three months and nothing is as powerful as lesbians ready to U-Haul. Except perhaps a third-wheeling ghost with severe attachment issues, played giddily by Bridgerton’s Isabella Wei.

As the excitable ghost climbs into Girl’s body, everything is new and tasty to her (except porridge, she realises with tongue-scraping disgust). Ailin Conant’s sensuous direction has Wei following then dragging Mac, manipulating Girl’s body and voice and capacity for consumption until she is a bottomless pit of need. Yimei Zhao’s sly set enables charming stage trickery as meals and shrines and escape-hatch windows appear. When food spills across the stage, it becomes a knees-on-the floor, arms-scooping, mouth-open-wide affair – but still not enough to fill up the hungry ghost.

Mac and Wei are gorgeous together, twisting across the stage as they vie for space in Girl’s skin (movement direction by Jasmine Chiu), with Cantonese gliding alongside English as the ghost escalates Girl’s sense of being pulled in opposing directions. As the situation escalates, the show veers between bright comedy and grotesque horror. A tongue, in particular, serves up a deliciously vile moment for the squeamish to look away.

Mac slips out of herself to play everyone else in the story: her bubbly girlfriend, her concerned mother, the disinterested officer called to the scene when the ghost’s hunger disrupts the fruit aisle at Sainsbury’s. The stage smells of incense sticks and oranges as the girl discovers she can collide the scattered parts of herself rather than be torn apart by them; this isn’t the kind of horror to leave everyone dead on stage. A late ghostly subplot earns less of your attention, but this dark, sexy, comic production is a treat for the taste buds.