Theatre

As we, the audience, enter the small room set with tiers of elevated rows of chairs, we walk into the scene of maidservants in 1600s Korea, busy preparing for the wedding of their beloved mistress and her mother dressing her.

As the bride-to-be picks up a fairytale book to read to her illiterate maids as they get on with their sewing, we also get sucked into this delightful art of storytelling using Korean traditional music, percussion and shadows on the wall. The love story of the book and the personal history of each women in the room are interwoven delicately and seamlessly, and the brilliance of the cast switching from one character to the next is a joy to watch.

Apart from having to move your eyes constantly from the subtitle on the left wall to the stage area in order to understand the narrative, it is a beautiful piece of theatre that I would gladly watch over and over again.

All I have been told about the show by the press officer is that it is a mime – naturally, I was expecting actors in black costume doing….er… mime.

It is actually a compact version of a jukebox musical, with performers lip synching to snippets from well known films and pop songs the entire show. The result is a slapstick comedy with a very loose plot of no significance.

Right from the beginning I was struggling to see the appeal of the show, with six all-equally-annoying characters with their stupid, brash not-that-funny jokes. Just as you start to enjoy the song they are singing, they will switch to another. Or play series of quotes from different films so fast that all I am thinking is ‘huh??’

It may work well as a clever skit, but a whole hour of this have been a pure torture.