Created by Yoon Junghwan, Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse

Review by Orly Benn

The thought of walking into Summerhall’s Main Hall 2 weeks after the end of the Fringe is somewhat akin to meeting your mum’s new partner not too long after the separation of your parents, stunted with memories of previous glories. However, this is immediately forgotten when walking into the energetic ceilidh festival celebration that welcomes the audience of TETHER by South Korea’s Theatre SAN and Scotland’s Wonder Fools.

This work-in-progress, performed on three sides, advertises itself as ‘a celebration of resilience, shared culture, and the deep human longing for connection’, and indeed excels in this pursuit.

Whilst rooted in a singular love story between a Korean soldier who finds himself in Scotland and his Scottish beau, Tether follows a timeline of generational love, resistance, cultural identity and collective memory. The opening ceilidh is a stunningly joyful and interactive microcosm of these themes, encouraging audience members to join the actors (or, ceilidh ‘regulars’) to dance along to the sublime beats of the live Korean/Scottish collaboration folk band. The seamless blend of actors and audience members in the collaborative act of folk dancing is conducive to the show’s holistic, tender focus on inter-personal and international care and connectivity. Time and history floats through this audience as the actors drift in and out of the ensemble narrative.

The ensemble’s use of folk dance and music is particularly interesting in the narrative of war and violence, morphing the weaving tropes of Korean and Scottish folk dance into more violent and militaristic lines. The emphasis on traditional modes of storytelling through song and dance to bridge the language barriers is beautifully playful and, for the most part, very effective. The returning motif of The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond becomes a gorgeous link to a Korean folk song, similarly about two lovers around a lake. Indeed, as the acoustic chords of the Scottish hymn close the show on the melody through ‘where me and my true love will never meet again on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’, we are shown how the folkloric oral song traditions both remain eternally communal and simultaneously reemphasise themes within individualised narratives of love, war and peace.

Certain moments of struggle arise in the natural logistics of an audience on three sides. The bilingual nature of a lot of the dialogue between Scottish and Korean voices is aided by a single clear projection of captions on the back wall. Whilst certainly symptomatic of a limited budget, the long room of the Main Hall makes the singular translation projection tricky to access at the same time as the on-stage action to any audience member not sitting in the end-on seating. As a result, crucial character introductions and beautiful one-liners were lost on me in the process of trying to juggle the translations and performances simultaneously.

Poeticism and thought spill out of the words that you do catch, though. The show’s sentiment is epitomised in the ethos that ‘music is important. To share. To pass on’. TETHER is an extremely exciting and promising piece that ‘passes on’ this musical significance through an international celebration that reminds us that it ‘is a blessing to be alive’.

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