The Hungry Ghost turns moving-in day into a spooky two-hander at the Bush Theatre

She has not told her parents she is gay. She has not told them about the flat she is moving into tonight with her girlfriend. And she has definitely not told them that, on her way there, she is going to pocket a coin lying in the street on the one night of the year her mother has specifically warned her not to. That night is the first of the Hungry Ghost Festival, the seventh lunar month when, in Chinese tradition, the dead are said to wander loose among the living. The coin, like the orange she lifts from the family altar on her way out the door, is not spare change. It is an invitation. By the time she reaches her new front door, something has already followed her in.

That is the premise of The Hungry Ghost, the debut play from British Malaysian-Chinese writer Mei Leng Yew, which opened at the Bush Theatre’s Studio on 1 October and runs until the 31st. Billed by the venue as a sexy horror rom-com, it takes the familiar shape of the dutiful daughter who can never quite satisfy what is expected of her and gives it a literal, appetite-driven twist: a ghost that does not just haunt the flat, but moves into the body of the woman living there.

Mei Mac plays Girl, the nameless heroine caught between a family who cares more than she can admit and a girlfriend, Naomi, she has not worked up the courage to introduce. Isabella Wei, fresh from playing Posy Li in the fourth season of Bridgerton, plays the ghost itself, arriving in a long black dress with a stare that holds a beat too long. Both actors switch between half a dozen roles across the two-hander, including Girl’s mother, her brother and a police officer, often finishing each other’s sentences or speaking in unison as the line between who is possessed and who is possessing blurs.

It would not be the first time this year the Bush has sent a show out into Shepherd’s Bush with that exact promise, after the theatre’s September world premiere of The Real Ones arrived with its own claim on a first-night crowd. The Hungry Ghost opens the Studio stretch of artistic director Taio Lawson’s first full season at the Bush, directed by Ailin Conant, artistic director of New Earth Theatre, in the company’s first full production under her leadership.

The comedy leans hardest on the household the play builds around its two leads. There is a running joke about the stereotype of the pushy Chinese parent, undercut by a mother who insists, straight-faced, that she gives her son total freedom over his future, provided that future is an engineering degree of some description. It is a small moment, but it carries the same tension the whole play is built on: the gap between what a family says it wants for you and what it actually expects.

The ghost, for her part, is not interested in subtlety. She takes over Girl’s appetites one at a time, at the dinner table, on a supermarket run that spirals well past anything reasonable, and in the bedroom, each craving pitched louder than the last. Whether that hunger belongs to the dead woman inside her or to Girl herself, newly free of the life she has been hiding, is the question the play keeps circling back to without rushing to answer it.

The Hungry Ghost runs at the Bush Theatre until 31 October 2026, with tickets priced between £15 and £25. The production carries a 16+ age guidance.

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