Belvoir Downstairs Theatre, June 19
6.5/10
Soon Hee never held her baby before she was taken away for adoption; just saw her tiny pink feet retreating in the nurse’s arms. She had fallen pregnant outside of wedlock, which, if discovered, would bring such shame on her family that people would shun the little Seoul shop run by her mother.
The pink feet belonged to a girl christened Hannah by her adoptive Australian parents. She was a young woman before she sought out her birth mother, and now she’s back in Seoul a second time to – what? Heal a wound? Form a bond? Discover her inner Korean self? “Koreaboo”, Michelle Lim Davidson explains in a preface to her play (here having its world premiere), is a pejorative term describing someone (usually non-Korean) obsessed with Korean culture.
The set-up to Davidson’s play is autobiographical, and potentially implicit in any such forced separation is deep scar tissue. But rather than milking tears, the playwright is more intent upon teasing out the laughs as Hannah tries to find a place in Soon Hee’s world.
Jessica Arthur’s Griffin Theatre Company production has Davidson, herself, playing Hannah, and Heather Jeong (best known as a TV chef) playing her mother. Mel Page’s set realises Davidson’s vision of a Seoul convenience store, complete with noodles, toilet paper and an imposing pyramid of Spam tins. This is Soon Hee’s domain, and an Australian invasion is not especially welcome, not only because any scar in Soon Hee’s heart has long been impenetrable, but because Hannah, keen to help, will just drive customers away with her hopeless command of Korean.
Jeong excels as the brutally honest Soon Hee, telling Hannah they look more like sisters than mother and daughter; exceptional at making this shop her castle; at raising the drawbridge against her daughter – not cruelly, but in a brusque, pragmatic way. Nonetheless, she makes us like Soon Hee, because we see through the act from the start, and we admire her stoicism and even her goofy obsessions with gnomes, Sex and the City and K-pop – notably in its TV talent quest guise of Star Power.
Davidson’s performance is more problematic, and perhaps she shouldn’t have been cast in her own play. As accomplished as we know she is as an actor, she can’t locate the same truth in playing Hannah as she did in writing the role. The performance becomes one-dimensional – Hannah the anguished victim – and so wooden that her hands barely cease to dangle by her thighs.
Writing the play should have been enough. It’s good, quirky work, that doesn’t seek to dot the “i” or cross the “t” in complexity, but lets it simmer in the background of the relationship. An actor who was not partially playing herself might have stormed into the role, made Hannah her own, and trusted the words, rather than being shy of finding the character’s core both vocally and physically.
Until July 20.
https://belvoir.com.au/productions/koreaboo/