Kim’s Convenience is a welcome sight in London as we don’t see much Korean culture on stage, despite the economic and political importance of the country.
The original was part of Toronto’s 2011 Fringe Festival and no concession is made to a London audience. The play is set in Canada, in a poor neighbourhood ripe for demolition.
The lights go up on a red-walled shop completely filled with coloured boxes, packets, cans of fizzy drink, bags of Cheesy Wotsits and other extruded snacks. We enter a world based on the writer Ins Choi’s boyhood after the family arrived from Korea and lived above his uncle’s convenience store.
Kim is a complex character, vividly created here by Ins Choi himself, as a man who is by turns pedantic, sentimental, thoughtful and stubborn. He is still referencing the 1904 invasion of Korea by Japan as a reason for his contemporary actions such as calling the police on a wrongly parked Honda because it is a Japanese make.
His life is filled with rules and prohibitions: from how to flatten and tie up the rubbish sacks to how to spot a thief: ‘Fat black, man brown shoes, no steal.’ He is the sort of man who always knows he is right, however personal his observations, such as when he says to his daughter Janet, ‘thirty and single, now is desperation time for you.’ Everything is a deal: she can take over the shop, he will be dead in ten years, ‘that’s a good deal for you.’
He diligently keeps running his shop which is, he says, ‘my story’, but knows he has no exit plan for the future. Any plan has been self-sabotaged by his dictatorial attitude to his children which has left one, his son Jung, estranged from him and his daughter Janet, distant and resentful. The play is the working out of these relationships.
Janet, played by Jennifer Kim, dominates the stage with a performance which is part hysteria part logic and is an ever-shifting counterpoint to Mr Kim’s solidity.
The very versatile Miles Mitchell plays several characters representative of the largely black neighbourhood in which the play is set. In these characters the play touches on the relationship between Koreans and black north Americans which has often been fraught.
The play spawned a 10-part Netflix sitcom and it is funny in a sitcom kind of way with strong characters with competing needs obliged to act together. The script is funny, if not uproarious, most of the humour comes from our laughing at the characters’ own self-deception.
The challenge of the play – inter-generations conflict in an Asian family – it is not fresh. The conflict, however, between loving a parent for what they have done in the past but resenting their control in the present day is an enduring and universal one.
Riverside Studios
Playwright: Ins Choi
Cast: Ins Choi, Namju Go, Jennifer Kim, Edward Wu, Miles Mitchell
Duration: 75 minutes, no interval
Until: 26 October