There is something almost mischievous about the title Tether 인연. A tether is a bond you can feel: a deliberate, physical attachment that keeps one thing tied to another. 인연 is more elusive. It suggests an invisible thread shaped by circumstance and timing, perhaps connecting people before they even know it exists. By the end of the play, that difference feels less like a translation problem than the point of the whole production. What appears at first to be a romantic story becomes something larger: a meditation on the connections between Scotland and Korea, between generations, and between memories.
At Summerhall’s compact Main Hall, the production looks simple. A raised platform at the back holds the musicians and their instruments, and there is little else in the way of scenery or props. But the simplicity is an advantage. With little to look at, you listen, watch and feel more closely. Music and dance are allowed to conjure what the set does not: a pub called Tether, the Scottish landscape, a battlefield on the Korean peninsula, and the strange, shapeless nature of memory.
Stuart Ramage’s original score is particularly effective at bringing these worlds together while allowing each to retain its own character. Scottish and Korean folk traditions are reimagined, allowed to overlap, move and answer each other. This is not cultural fusion in the sense of throwing everything into the same pot until the ingredients become unrecognisable. You hear Scotland and know it is Scotland; you hear Korea and know it is Korea. The pleasure lies in the spaces where they unexpectedly echo and complement each other.
Language creates a similar tension. The play moves between English and Korean, with the bilingual script projected live. As someone who speaks both Korean and English but experiences both cultures from the outside, I found myself particularly attuned to the different energies carried by the two languages. Some lines seem to arrive with a different weight when heard in Korean, while others feel more exposed in English. The bilingual script can feel slightly uneven at times, but that dissonance feels strangely appropriate. Scottish characters speak English while Korean characters speak Korean; translation is unnecessary because they simply understand each other. Dae Han (Hyeonkyu Choi), who facilitates the Korean circle dance Ganggangsullae, even guides invited audience members in Korean with an easy confidence that they will understand. It is a small but telling moment. The linguistic difference across the hall does not necessarily have to mean incomprehension.
The play’s most convincing language may be dance. Tether 인연 uses social dancing both as cultural expression and as a way of organising memory. The pub Tether, Dae Han and Jane’s love story, Min Guk and Nancy’s encounter, and the later relationship between Mi So and Jane, the professor, are threaded across three generations and five decades. One memory seems to pull another towards it. The dances do the same thing physically: each carries the performers, and sometimes the audience, between periods and places, offering brief bursts of pleasure amid stories of war and its aftermath. It is a welcome reminder that history is not remembered only through suffering. People also remember music, a joyous night in a pub, and the feeling of moving in step with someone else.
There is something similarly slippery in the names. Dae Han and Min Guk carry resonances of Korea’s own political and national vocabulary, while the play introduces another layer to “Han” through the character 恨, associated here with sorrow. Mi So, meanwhile, is connected to the smile Dae Han remembers seeing on her mother’s face. The names become small containers of memory.
This is where Tether 인연 becomes more interesting than a straightforward story of Scottish-Korean cultural exchange. Its central connection is not simply Dae Han and Jane’s, and perhaps not even Scotland’s and Korea’s. It is the connection between one generation and the next, between the people who experience an event and those who inherit its memory. And that connection is never created by making the two cultures identical. It comes from allowing each to remain itself and discovering the invisible thread between them.
Tether 인연
A collaboration of Wonder Fools and Theatre SAN
Written and directed by Robbie Gordon, Jack Nurse, Yoon Junghwan.
Cast Includes: Molly Bryson, Isabella Jarrett, Naomi Stirrat, Mi-soo Kim, Hyeon-kyu Choi, Jun-woo Hwang, Martin Donaghy.
Until: 31 Aug 2026
Running Time: 1 hour (no interval)
Review by: Ziyu Zhang
11 August 2026
Photo Credit: Eoin Carey