Writer: Xinyu Lu
Director: Miranda 杨知君
Four crumbling walls, three lost adults mourning their parents, two countries of origin and one small spot in the UK to call home. Three siblings with East Asian parents named Vanessa, Ethan and Lim prepare the documentation to demolish their family home in the South of England. “Within this house we had a completely different culture,” says Lim (the eldest), “we spoke an entirely different language.”
Xinyu Lu’s 60-minute show, playing as part of the SE Fest, staggers often with deafening, unbridled anger in its dialogue for the loss of culture, home and parents, which in equal parts nurtured or traumatised these children. But more than occasionally, the performances cannot stand up to the script’s demands, the ingenuity of this work’s technical wizardry and the accomplishments of the play’s set.
For a home, after all, is only as good as the people within it. And for all the magnificent stage design — sand crumbling in actors’ hands in place of family heirlooms or a videorecorder displaying memories from different perspectives on the back wall — the characters still don’t feel complete. This isn’t saying that Lim’s (Kevin Ip’s) emotional fury at bearing the burden of responsibility for his family isn’t gut-wrenching.
Vanessa’s (Chen Xu’s) internal battle against becoming like her mother is masterfully done; likewise, Ethan’s (Yijia Gong’s) distress at finding out how sheltered he was as the youngest child pulses like an electric shock through the stage. It is more that all of these separate pieces of anguish cannot sustain us for the whole hour.
Yet, nothing will take away from the set. Displaying the possibilities of minimalism, the stage shows one chair, a set of cardboard boxes and sand splattered around on a plastic sheet to be collected into a cardboard box (the container holding the whole house together). It’s made from pure genius, the ‘stuff as dreams are made of’. A musician strikes musical motifs on an electric guitar to stage left, and melodies build up, reminding us of scenes we have watched play out before. Grief, watching this play, feels like a guitar string plucked with ever-growing force until a climax.
At the very best of moments, The Obituary reminds one of films like Sentimental Value or well-made plays like Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, where the messy human paradoxes of virtue and conceit echo forth into the audience’s senses. And yet, the seams between each moment need some extra stitches in The Obituary and, after all, a play destroying the structures of a home needs a sturdy foundation.
Reviewed on 9 September 2026 and plays at Bridge House Theatre on 10 September 2026
