Venue: The Neilson Nutshell (Sydney NSW), Jan 15 – 18, 2026
Creators: Monica Lim, Mindy Meng Wang
Images by Jacquie Manning
Theatre review
The show opens with a disembodied voice recounting a daily ritual: waking each morning, drinking tea, smoking a cigarette, and encountering the apparition of someone lost. Fittingly, Opera for the Dead 祭歌 by Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim unfolds as a work of abstraction—an exploration of mourning and remembrance grounded in Chinese conceptions of death and ancestral veneration. Rather than advancing a conventional plot or narrative, the piece offers a theatrical meditation shaped by resplendent music and carefully wrought visual elements, which together seek not to explain grief but to summon it, to evoke and to resonate.
Singer Yu-Tien Lin leaves an indelible impression, commanding the stage with formidable vocals that move effortlessly between traditional and contemporary idioms. Lin’s extraordinary ability to inhabit the score’s gender-fluid demands—both in technical execution and in spirit, whether 小生 or 花旦—is nothing short of mesmerising, at times genuinely jaw-dropping. Leonas Panjaitan’s costuming lends the work a stately grandeur, ingeniously repurposing operatic and mourning attire drawn from Chinese traditions. Meanwhile, Nick Roux’s video design and Jenny Hector’s lighting permit themselves moments of greater extravagance; what they deliver, however, remains unequivocally captivating.
The music of Wang and Lim is anchored in something unmistakably ancient, yet it never feels ossified; instead, it emerges as modern, invigorating and alive. For those shaped by diasporic experience, relationships to cultural origins are often fraught. We cling to memories of a homeland as though these points of origin were immutable, even as we negotiate new lives and attempt to reconcile identities that perpetually straddle two or more paradigms. Opera for the Dead 祭歌 approaches tradition not as a binary between past and present, but as a circular continuum—one that speaks not only to those with ties to China, but to anyone bound, inevitably and universally, to the condition of death.
Suzy Goes See 