Venue: Belvoir St Theatre (Surry Hills NSW), Jul 30 – Aug 15, 2026
Playwright: Eric Jiang
Director: Nicole Pingon
Cast: Dominic Lui, Loretta Kung, Rachel Seeto
Images by Phil Erbacher

Theatre review
During 清明节 the Qingming Festival, Claudia botches a prayer ritual and stumbles into the underworld, where she not only encounters 孟婆 Meng Po, the goddess of oblivion, but secures employment from her. Tasked with extinguishing fragments of human memory, Claudia begins wielding her newfound powers with dangerous latitude, manipulating her mother’s mind in a desperate bid to engineer a more bearable coexistence. Eric Jiang’s Lacuna mines Chinese mythology to frame a contemporary meditation on generational fracture, centring the particular estrangement of young queer Chinese diasporic subjects navigating a culture that has historically refused them acceptance.

Jiang’s script is audacious from the first beat, yet it never sacrifices warmth for spectacle. The writing sustains a deft comic register throughout, undercutting its metaphysical premises with sharp wit and unexpected tenderness. This interplay of the supernatural and the sentimental gives director Nicole Pingon ample terrain for visual dynamism: she injects the staging with restless energy, drawing on traditional Chinese performance vocabularies to conjure something that feels at once ancient and urgently contemporary. Pingon’s comic instincts are equally refined, ensuring that Lacuna delights not merely through the ingenuity of its premise, but through a sustained, self-aware commitment to entertainment.

Production design by Hailley Hunt is elegantly uncluttered—never ostentatious, yet furnishing the cast with everything necessary to forge indelible characters and drive the narrative confidently. Morgan Moroney’s lighting proves quietly revelatory, shifting with disarming speed to render the supernatural realms in configurations that are frequently breathtaking; entire worlds materialize and dissolve in the span of a single cue. Sam Cheng’s sound and music, meanwhile, lean into operatic grandeur, amplifying the majesty of spiritual lore and lending propulsive dynamism to the production’s martial-inspired sequences.

At the centre of it all, Rachel Seeto delivers a Claudia of remarkable specificity, embedding every gesture with subtext and every line with nuanced intention. Her commanding physicality—assured, fluid, and precise—effectively defines the production’s hybrid aesthetic, synthesizing Eastern and Western performance traditions into a coherent stylistic whole. Dominic Lui matches her in physical accomplishment; his acrobatic work channels the theatrical sorcery of Chinese opera, while his impeccable comic timing lands with exhilarating precision, generating waves of laughter that keep the production buoyant even in its most wistful passages. Loretta Kung, doubling as Meng Po and Claudia’s mother, anchors the piece with a gravitas that feels culturally rooted and authentic. Her presence carries the weight of lineage and authority befitting both roles.

Meng Po waits at the Bridge of Oblivion, where souls must drink to forget, before they may be reborn. Claudia, however, mistakes erasure for repair, believing she can mend her present by vandalizing her past. We see in Lacuna that denial is a kind of trap—that confrontation, however painful, is the only genuine prelude to growth. The play asks whether we can ever truly move forward until we have faced what we most wish to forget.

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