Secrets and lies in the hermit nation
The Great Wave
NT’S Dorfman Theatre
‘Understanding North Korea is like figuring out a detective story where you stumble across a corpse in the library, a smoking gun beside it, and the corpse gets up and says that’s no gun and it isn’t smoking and this isn’t a library. It is like nowhere else on Earth.”
So, memorably, wrote the investigative journalist John Sweeney in the introduction to his 2014 book
North Korea: Undercover following a risky Panorama documentary that provided rare footage of life inside the hermit kingdom. The high achievement of Francis Turnly’s new play, focusing on what over here is the relatively little known abduction of more than a dozen Japanese citizens to North Korea in the late Seventies, is that it conveys that through-thelooking-glass peculiarity. What the piece foregrounds very forcefully is what a culture of endemic deception and distortion does to a person. When you’re continually keeping up appearances to stave off dire punishment, what part of you is truly your own? At what point do you lose your sense of self?
The first time we see Kirsty Rider’s Hanako, she’s a rebellious 17-year-old Japanese schoolgirl sparring with her older, more studious sister Reiko, and vying for the attention of the latter’s beau – willing to rise to his rash invitation to watch the high storm waves down by the nearby shore. She vanishes – spirited away to a compound deep inside the “Democratic People’s Republic”.
There’s no prospect of release unless she assists her female handler (Tuyen Do’s Jung Sin) by learning Korean, getting into unisex garb and a Communist mindset, then teaching Jung Sin how to “become” Japanese.
Initially straightforward, even slow-moving, the evening builds considerable intellectual complexity – as the two worlds embodied by the women collide and they endeavour to swap identities. It acquires harrowing emotional heft too, as Hanako gets married off to a mentally scarred former gulag inmate and we track the dogged efforts of those seeking her return, most poignantly her mother (Rosalind Chao).
The glancing look at the way the Japanese authorities themselves acted in a secretive fashion, subordinating the fate of those abducted to the greater good of international relations, might seem forced, but it’s a measure of how insightful the play is that everything slots so neatly together.
Directed by Indhu Rubasingham, Rider gives a powerfully affecting performance as the girl who grows to maturity in a living nightmare, torn between a perverse sense of duty to her adopted homeland, the yearning to go home and, finally, the need to protect her Nk-born daughter. She’s a work of fiction, founded on researched fact. Our entertainment is rooted in real pain. A valuable, often uncomfortable and at times keenly distressing evening.
Until April 14. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk