Don’t think because it twinkles, it can’t cut. Or that a guessable happy ending rules out revelations. Kim’s Convenience disarms with darting charm, then gently nudges audiences to look at their preconceptions.
This tickety-boo production – bright and light on its feet – directed by Esther Jun is an unusual mixture of the familiar and the new. Ins Choi’s debut play about a Canadian-Korean family and their corner shop in Toronto was first seen 13 years ago at the Toronto fringe; snapped up by Netflix, it ran for five seasons. Choi has tweaked it back on to the stage for its European premiere. He himself takes – with unruffled authority – the role of Appa, paterfamilias and proprietor, first-generation immigrant, proud entrepreneur. In the first stage version, Jun played the part of the daughter who is breaking away from her parents and their business (Janet is “single, ready to mingle”). Jennifer Kim plays Janet at the pocket-sized Park: spot-on as a 30-year-old teenager, both vivacious and anxious.
Netflix fans will instantly recognise the bubble-like atmosphere of the shop. Mona Camille’s set is beautifully busy: lollipop colours; shelves crammed with Cheerios and Vaseline, ginseng tablets and giant packets of nuts; fridges like grounded aircraft. Adrienne Quartly’s sound design, which includes an elegiac song, creates an island of distinct noises, punctuated by the click of the pricing gun and the bell that maddeningly ding-dongs every time someone crosses the threshold. The recurring jokes are still sharp. Prejudice zigzags around as Appa issues advice for spotting a shoplifter: the young black man in a jean jacket is dodgy; the two lesbians are safe. His overall tip neatly bounces off racism: “Make eyes small. No one knows you look.”
The buoyancy of the evening is its own reward. It also gives wings to the play’s polemic. Kim’s Convenience is part of an overdue movement to wake up the British theatre to east and south-east Asian lives. Kimber Lee’s untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, staged last year at the Manchester international festival, shook audiences into awareness as it ripped into musical stereotypes. In parodying the idea of any monocular world vision, Choi also swivels the eyes of spectators with his Korean quiz. Question: where is the Sea of Japan? Answer: it doesn’t exist. Question: who is Kim Hyung-soon? Answer: the guy who crossed a peach and a plum and invented the nectarine. Korean, of course.
Harsher histories of migration are forcefully staged in Amit Lahav’s Kin. Lahav, artistic director of the multilingual physical theatre company Gecko, was inspired by the journey made by his grandmother Leah, a Yemenite Jew who in 1932 fled to Palestine, escaping persecution. Kin intertwines her story with others, devised by members of the company. It is visually glorious, passionately delivered – and blurred.
A series of flights are enacted in chiaroscuro to the sound of klezmer, requiem and guttural song. Chris Swain’s extraordinary lighting steers the mood, making the prevailing darkness as thick as treacle under a heavy gold moon. Couples and groups arrive at borders with their suitcases: time and again, they are stopped by guards demanding papers; time and again one person is arbitrarily turned back and another let through. People sway in lifejackets as a blue video swirls wavelike, or scramble in front of a flame-coloured screen. A woman has a yellow stripe painted on the back of her coat.
The general anguish is evident but it is hard to follow in detail what is going on – or indeed make out if there is detail to follow. Occasional snatches of dialogue – in Mandarin, Norwegian, Spanish – are not subtitled. The story is told in surges of movement, which breaks in and out of dance. Characters bend as if bowed by an unheard wind though their gestures are pugnacious: they stamp and clap, punch their fists in the air.
Constant repetition, with the same hardships inflicted on different groups of characters, slows the pulse of events, resulting in an evening more like ritual than chronicle. More damagingly, the meshing together of migrant stories diminishes the impact of each: the effect is not so much universal as approximate. This should have been the most urgent of shows. Actually, it is more striking than disturbing.
The Prince of Denmark and the Buddha of Suburbia are about to share a pad. Announcing their inaugural season at a vivacious press conference last week, the new artistic directors of the RSC, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, declared there was “no such thing as a not-RSC play”. So Hanif Kureishi’s vivid, important novel (which more than 30 years ago I spectacularly failed to persuade my fellow Booker prize judges to shortlist) will be staged at Stratford, adapted by Emma Rice. As will other non-Bard works, among them Kyoto, produced in partnership with Good Chance Theatre, and The School for Scandal.
Despite the century-hopping, the “S” in the theatre’s title will dominate. On whatever day someone comes to Stratford there will, Evans insisted, always be a Shakespeare play to be seen. This may sometimes be not so much a feast as a snack: the garden theatre, which opened during Covid, is to return, staging special compact productions. That is good news. As is the casting of Hamlet, who next year will be played by Luke Thallon. One of the most chimerical of actors in one of the most contradictory of parts. A hopeful emblem of a new regime.
Star ratings (out of five)
Kim’s Convenience ★★★★
Kin ★★★
Kim’s Convenience is at the Park theatre until 10 February
Kin is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre until 27 January
