This gripping tear-jerker from Northern Irish-Japanese writer Francis Turnly is a decades-spanning thriller about the North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens in the late ’70s.
Hanako (Kirsty Rider) is a rebellious 17-year-old Japanese teen who inexplicably vanishes on the night of a great storm in 1979. Her sister Reiko (Kae Alexander) claims she saw her being taken from the beach by a trio of strange-looking men. But the police are sceptical and suspicion falls on schoolfriend Tetsuo (Leo Wan), who suggested the ill-fated trip to the shore.
Meanwhile Hanako wakes up in a cell-like room to discover a pair of strangers bellowing at her in an unfamiliar language. To her horror, she discovers she is in North Korea – though is assured she will be able to leave if she can complete a few tasks for the Dear Leader.
One of the most remarkable things about North Korea is its continued ability to cook up scenarios that are more dramatic than those a dramatist might invent. ‘The Great Wave’ is not a true story, but it’s firmly based on fact, with Hanako’s story closely resembling that of Megumi Yokota, a 13-year-old Japanese abductee who became the poster girl for a growing Japanese movement to discover the truth about the hugely sensitive abductions.
It’s a remarkable tale with a cracking central performance from Rider as Hanako, visibly straining under the weight of her enforced new life, but never breaking. Her carefree teenage persona burns off, but there’s a diamond-hard, indestructible core under it.
And over in Japan there’s another sort of strain – Reiko and their mother Etsuko (Rosalind Chao) are not subject to the same terrible physical hardships that Hanako is, but their lives are put on hold for decades, unable to move on.
Turnly’s script is slick and lucid, a rock-solid piece of storytelling that’s relentlessly interesting and knows exactly when to pull your emotional levers.
At the same time ‘The Great Wave’ does sometimes feel more like a staged screenplay than something more overtly theatrical. It’s pacy and gripping, but there’s no formal invention here: it’s stuffed with Hollywood-style tropes and it doesn’t really drill down especially far into either Japanese or North Korean society.
But if it sometimes feel like ‘The Great Wave’ favours pace over depth then that’s mostly fine – it still has a great story to tell. And director Indhu Rubasingham gives it a crisp production that has the speed of a film, with set designer Tom Piper and video designer Luke Halls creating a flexible, fast-spinning, vaguely cubist-looking world, topped with the enormous wave that vaults toward the ceiling. I’d love to see the movie version, but this is great entertainment – and it is, of course, refreshing to see an East Asian ensemble on a major London stage.