Kim Jong-un’s grandad was a wrong ’un too!
AS A child on family holidays in Spain I was sometimes told by playmates to beware local gipsies ‘because they kidnap English children and you will never again see your parents’.
Probably unfair on the gipsies, but that was the lurid rumour.
In 1979, something similar was said in Japan after young adults went missing — the rumour was that the North Koreans snatched the youngsters to brainwash them as possible future spies. And it happened to be true. Francis Turnly’s interesting play looks at one abduction. Schoolgirl Hanako has had a row with her sister and stomps off to the beach, never to return.
Hanako, 17, has been taken by North Korean agents and ends up in a cell decorated by a portrait of ‘Great Leader’, Kim Il-sung (Kim Jong-un’s grandpa).
Hanako is told she may not return home until she has learned Korean and come to accept the supremacy of the North Korean way of life.
As the Dorfman stage’s revolve turns, we see Hanako’s desolate mother and sister working with a young journalist to shame the Japanese foreign ministry into admitting it knows such kidnappings are happening.
Indhu Rubasingham’s uncluttered production tells the story crisply, though with too little internal characterisation.
The plot gallops along and is at its best when we are in North Korea and see Hanako trying to form a friendship with Jung Sun (Tuyen Do), a communist she is instructing in Japanese culture.
Kirsty Rider has touching moments of loneliness as Hanako. Kwong Loke is good as the outwardly rigid North Korean commander who tries to frighten Hanako into accepting her new fate.
Look out for David Yip as a policeman, Kae Alexander as Hanako’s sister, Rosalind Chao as her mum and Leo Wan as the journalist. The best moment is when a terrified North Korean (Vincent Lai) jabbers support for Kim while a soldier’s torch beam shines at his mouth.
Some of the writing is blunt — a police interrogation is cornily done — but dramatic niggles are balanced by the subject matter.
Here is a show addressing genuine, pressing threats to liberty rather than the petty infractions of the Western grievance politics we are so often offered.
The tale takes satisfying twists and the slow conclusion may elicit discreet tears.