Girl

Performed mostly in Korean without surtitles—but with intermittent English interjections and translation—this historical drama by Modli is rather appropriately about the difficulties we sometimes encounter in speaking and listening. In particular, about trauma.

A woman brings her recently deceased mother’s ashes back to her family, who had long thought her dead after she went missing during the Second World War. In the intervening years, it emerges, she had been kept by the occupying Japanese forces as a “comfort woman”— the hideously euphemistic term for the army’s sexual enslavement of girls as young as twelve—and after her escape, cut all family ties to save them from disgrace.

The language barrier onstage—the woman’s daughter is from Myanmar, and so has to have a translator—draws attention to the problems of trying to communicate the unspeakable, and creates some poignant drama as she painfully acts out some of her mother’s experience to her horrified relatives. These reenactments and fraught discussions around the urn reflect on the ways in which the past invades the present, however much we may try to forget – and the importance of rituals and remembering as a means of coming to terms with it.

For an issue that’s clearly been given research and thought however, there’s a surprisingly quick resolution to the whole saga – at only 50 minutes, few of the audience actually realise it’s the end since the play seems to be just hitting its stride.