Aubrey Wang reviews lacuna by Eric Jiang at Belvoir Downstairs, Griffin Lookout 2026. A freelance psychopomp harvests the memories of the living on contract to the goddess of oblivion. An Orphic English-Cantonese three-hander about queer and diaspora grief, and the gig economy of forgetting.
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Rachel Seeto and Dominic Lui star in lacuna, a English-Cantonese three-hander by Eric Jiang at Belvoir Downstairs, part of Griffin Theatre Company's 2026 Lookout program.
Asian daughters are a bit like greyhounds. Through so many comparisons with more successful relatives, dopamine hits from doing well on standardised tests, and withheld parental warmth, we're taught that there's always a naked bird on a string somewhere, and to stop chasing it is to give up completely.
And then around 4 or 5 in dog years we're retired. Gone is the racetrack, and we're left with couches and a fair dose of canine anxiety. The person who owns us would just like us to calm down, to potato on the couch and to accept the treat without needing to have earned it first. But the racetrack has been internalised and our muscles are tensed as if to keep running.
It's fair to say that lacuna is an Orphic play. Where Orpheus descends into the underworld to resurrect his fiancé, Claudia descends to take on contract work. She's hired by Meng Po, the goddess of oblivion, and the job description involves harvesting the memories of the living and incinerating them at the end of the shift.
An issue that I felt I had joining the workforce, and am painting with broad strokes onto the rest of Asian-Australians, is that we've been trained all our lives to not just be good at what we do but the best. When really what's asked of us in the workplace is not the racetrack but the couch. Be boring, be predictable, be reliable, don't freak out.
Claudia begins streamling her routes, batching her jobs, discarding multiple memories in one trip, gamifying her own incentives. The gig-economy conceit gives the play its comedy and it gives the play its horror. The comedy is that Claudia is too good at her job, and the horror is that she desires the recognition she never got from her mother from an employer who only desires optimisation.
While the marketing copy is careful never to advertise lacuna as an AI or a late capitalism play, Jiang has, without once showing us the technology, struck the very core of what the technology is doing to our desire.
Could I have written this? I ask in the theatre, in the dark, with a small mean pencil in my hand, and I ask it of novels and films and, God help me, of restaurants. I went to lacuna with Henry, who was my scene partner in Chinese Restaurant two years ago. Our joke on the way to the theatre was that we could have done it in Mandarin and better. But we as we walked out the Belvoir to catch the 374, I mumbled, twice, with my hands in my pockets, something to the effect of "I couldn't have written that."
I couldn't have written that. An understatement, and the highest praise a greyhound knows how to give. I couldn't have written that is all the more absurd because what we had watched was not just a piece of writing. It was a piece of audiovisual design, a stand-up comedy, a piece of Chinese opera acrobatics that has you walking of the black box forgetting that you have a body. lacuna is a play the way a magic trick is a card.
The play's philosophy of memory, I think, is also a philosophy of witness, of witnessing, of being witnessed. This is why Claudia's job as a psychopomp for the goddess of oblivion has a moral aspect to it. To erase a memory is to foreclose the possibility of it being witnessed. And it's especially in the erasure of queer memories that the play shows its stakes.
Eric Jiang's dialogue is wok-hei fast. Wok-hei describes food cooked in a wok at a temperature slightly higher than what's reasonable, and one of those exciting qualifiers one peppers in when they want their fair share of diaspora valour. But I mean it for real. The writing imparts fever-pitch flavours in a matter of seconds. The scenes come off the burner aromatic and sizzling at the tips. The play moves from punchline to punchline so quickly that the slower, more descriptive scene-setting prose is experienced as a small mercy; the audience had otherwise forgotten to breath.
In parts, the prose is rich in a way that would sink a lesser production; but in the hands of Nicole Pingon, Jiang's descriptions are staged as visual events. You start to hallucinate the actual boulevards running through Rookwood Cemetery onto the blackouts. The exposition, delivered spoken word, is played like music, always on top of visible action and experienced as rhythm.
The company producing this on the Belvoir Downstairs floor is Essential Workers (stylised, on their materials, as es. wrkers, serif, lowercase — a graphic-design choice I have complicated feelings about but which is, I concede, very hot). It's an independent operation whose previous formula has been the high-production solo show; I Watched Someone Die on TikTok, which came to Sydney after picking up awards in Melbourne and Perth, is the piece by which most of us know them. Their philosophy has always been verbal storytelling with the audiovisual strategy of a magic show, if magic shows were also designed to make the third row cry.
I need to talk about the lighting, and I knew I'd need to talk about it the moment we sat down and registered, before the play began, that the stage was bare except for the backdrop and sprung floor, taped in a red that screamed EMERGENCY. Oh, and the fake smoke, coming in somewhere between a vintage Shanghai cabaret and "who's out the back vaping?" Not much else would make its way onto that stage, and somehow the audience would be transported from Rookwood cemetery to the underworld to several Chinese New Year dinners and back again.
I've remarked on Moroney's work previously in Everything I Know About this Water Bottle in the Old Fitz Late Night slot, where they memorably took us from the Carboniferous period to an offshore oil rig with two Bunnings floodlights and a dimmer from the 90s. With the full Belvoir Downstairs infrastructure, lacuna is like watching someone who has been sketching in ballpoint be given a box of oil paints.
Moroney returns with their trademark mix of the industrial and the maverick. The highlight? The pinspot lights (vintage looking things with filaments, that flickered as though the steam engine was about to be invented) that were integrated with the Belvoir's standard LED stock to turn the downstairs space into a kind of laser-tag escape room — making the show's themes of gamification quite literal.
Audience members remarked how miraculously well they knew where everything was. This is because Moroney reproduces lighting your body remembers: the Chinese restaurant; the strip of hallway light coming through a door left slightly ajar; Rookwood Cemetery on a cold but clear afternoon in winter, joss paper smoke in the air.
The FOH strobe warning, incidentally, is not a joke. The strobe is excessive. It is not, however, overused. I note here lacuna's filmic quality, which the strobe may be to blame for. The lacunae that the show title refers to may very well describe the small lapses in visibility created by the rapid strobes and blackouts, which function much like cuts in a film editing or the way continuity itself works in memory. An ambitious and successful extrusion of theatrical form into filmic temporality.
Every performer in this cast has, somewhere in their training, an Asian performing-arts tradition that makes the physical comedy fill every square inch of the place.
Loretta Kung, as Meng Po, has an IMDB profile that lists, under skills, close quarter knife combat — I had to double-take on this line, screenshot it, and send it to 5 people on WeChat. She never handles a knife on stage, and never needs to. Her expressions and her gestures are, on their own, weapons-grade. There is a moment when she flicks her fan across her collarbone and I felt personally reprimanded for a decision I made in 2019. She is terrifying, and she is magnetic, and I would like her to play every mother in every play in this country for the next five years, if only so that some of us finally get around to therapy.
Dominic Lui plays the Rabbit God — Tu'er Shen, patron of queer love in the Chinese folk tradition — and, later, the gay friend, and, later still, a whole cascade of spirit forms. He has been trained, I think, in Chinese opera acrobatics, and early on he kinda just walks onstage on his hands in a way that got the woman next to me going "oh." He spends the rest of the evening bouncing around the black box like a slinky, agile, boneless, and, when he wants to be, unexpectedly still. Lui is a shape-shifter playing a shape-shifter, and Jiang has given him a monologue about desire that could not have been better physicalized: "I can be whatever you want, I can shape and change what you desire, and what it means to you."
Rachel Seeto holds the centre, and is subjectivity made audible. The role of Claudia is Hamlet-esque — she is the first person singular, the mind through which the play thinks — but Rachel Seeto's Claudia, on top of a performance thesis on doubt, also has the comedic timing of a stand-up storyteller, the quickness of a comic book protagonist, the stuntsmanship of an action-movie assassin.
The mother scenes are funny, and they are touching, and they are also (I say this with love) redundant. Everything you needed to know about Claudia's mother was already in the way Meng Po talked to Claudia at work. The mother-daughter dynamic was already entirely apparent in Claudia's relationship with her boss. Loretta Kung's Meng Po is the mother, terrifying and magnetic, fan and all. Then the play flinched from saying it, and gave us Loretta Kung as the literal mother, one more time, to be sure. The mother, as a character, was best when she was the negative space around the boss.
I wanted to cry. I would have liked catharsis. My rubric here is that a five-star play sends me home using the seat in front of me as a tissue; a four-and-a-half-star play sends me home with a slight sting behind my eyes and a very sharp pencil. The catharsis was missed by a whisker, and perhaps deliberately — I am prepared to entertain the possibility that Jiang would find catharsis vulgar, and I would respect that position even as I disagreed with it. Claudia was in survival mode, and so, by design, were we. Fair enough.
It is, regardless, the best new diaspora work I have seen this year. Some plays are more than the writing because the writing does what performance writing does at its best, which is to speak with theatre in mind.
lacuna is on for three more nights. Go alone if you have to. It is not, whatever your mother said, bad luck. Let Essential Worker's ensemble show you what a card trick, in the right hands, can do.
Reviewed by Aubrey Wang
Une psychopompe freelance récolte les souvenirs des vivants pour le compte de la déesse de l'oubli.
A freelance psychopomp harvests the memories of the living on contract to the goddess of oblivion — an Orphic Cantonese three-hander about queer memory, diaspora grief, and the gig economy of forgetting.
Autrice·eur | Playwright Eric Jiang [FR?]
Mise en scène | Director Nicole Pingon
Décors et costumes | Set & Costume Designer Hailley Hunt
Conception lumières | Lighting Designer Morgan Moroney
Composition et conception sonore | Composer & Sound Designer Sam Cheng
Assistant·e à la conception lumières | Assistant Lighting Designer Luna Yuet Yee Ng [FR?]
Dramaturge | Dramaturg Jules Orcullo
Productrice créative | Creative Producer Zoë Hollyoak
Régie | Stage Manager Jonathan Ogilvie
Distribution | Cast Rachel Seeto (Claudia) · Loretta Kung (Meng Po / Mother) · Dominic Lui (Rabbit God / Housemate / Spirits)
Présenté par | Presented by Griffin Theatre Company & Essential Workers
Presse | Media & PR Kabuku Public Relations (Sean Radecki, Briana Carboni)
Durée | Running time 90 minutes, no interval
Langue | Language Cantonese and English, with surtitles
Lumières clignotantes | Flashing lights Yes — strobe warning in effect
Avertissements | Content warnings Strobe lighting; themes of grief, queer identity, intergenerational conflict
Venue Belvoir Downstairs
25 Belvoir Street, Surry Hills
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