HATER
The Space
★★★★
“an inventive, emotionally incisive, and culturally sharp piece”
Though not a new work, Hater makes an impressive appearance at this year’s Voila Festival. It opens with a deceptively gentle touch: a baby bunny puppet, soft and endearing, leads us into the story. But the sweetness quickly fractures, revealing far heavier terrain—C-PTSD, immigration, family trauma, fractured relationships, and the relentless pressures of survival. This sharp tonal shift immediately signals the ambition of Gawa Leung’s writing: a play about the invisible weight of immigrant life.
Rather than relying on grand statements, Hater builds its world through precise, almost documentary-like details of diasporic existence: the symbolic economics of a Tesco meal deal, the bureaucratic nightmare of visa systems, the absurd burden of performing a sexualized linguistic identity. These accumulated minutiae echo the sociological concept of “microaggressions”—small daily wounds that, as the play argues, eventually crystallize into the profound weariness that breeds a “hater.”
A brilliant structural device underpins the show: the four-part Bunny narrative, which functions both metaphorically and theoretically. The bunny, a creature perpetually out of place, becomes a precise mirror for the immigrant navigating a world never designed for her.
Gawa Leung and Lorraine Yu deliver the Bunny allegory with superb precision and emotional intelligence, guiding it through a four-part evolution without ever announcing its structure. A highlight arrives when Lorraine delivers “Mummy’s” Cantonese and Gawa translates live onstage. It’s not just bilingual performance—it becomes a vivid expression of the diasporic condition, where translation itself exposes both intimacy and cultural distance. As the bunny tries to “fit into a SeaLife,” Gawa and Lorraine shift effortlessly between humour and desperation, making assimilation feel almost physically suffocating. Under Tess Adèle Glinert’s direction, the piece moves with humour and sharp insight, rendering the immigrant world both painfully real and disarmingly funny.
The play’s central question—Where does the hater come from? —finds its answer not in grand passions but in a thousand tiny cuts. A hater is forged in the crucible of economic pressure, emotional isolation, familial misalignment, and the exhausting navigation of systems built for others. The meta-theatrical motif of “stalking another East Asian woman” is particularly sharp—not born of love or jealousy, but of a desperate immigrant self-interrogation: How did she make it? What is her secret to survival?
Hater is full of surprises, though two elements hold it back from complete polish. One is narrative clarity, that the allegorical Bunny structure is beautifully crafted, but the real-world narrative becomes scattered across too many thematic threads. Another is theatrical transitions: with such dialogue-heavy material, the production would benefit from more dynamic physical staging, bolder scene shifts, and more strategic lighting to maintain rhythm and visual engagement.
Overall, Hater is an inventive, emotionally incisive, and culturally sharp piece—rare in its ability to blend humour, trauma, and immigrant politics with daring imagination. Its potential is enormous, and with clearer dramaturgy and stronger theatrical transitions, it could solidify its place as an essential work of the diaspora canon.
HATER
The Space
Reviewed on 16th November 2925
by Portia Yuran Li
Previously reviewed at this venue:
WOMEN OVER 30 DON’T MATTER | ★★★★ | November 2025
AN INTERVENTION | ★★★½ | August 2025
A KISS FOR CINDERELLA | ★★★ | December 2024
ONE MAN POE | ★★★ | October 2021
