Theatre review: The Great Wave

A commonplace scene of teenage sisters squabbling quickly turns into a thriller when Hanako (Kirsty Rider) is dared to go for a late-night walk on the beach in the middle of a storm and disappears. She's assumed to have been washed away by a wave but her sister Reiko (Kae Alexander) insists she saw three men take her away. The investigation is fruitless and eventually abandoned, but a few years later the girls' friend Tetsuo (Leo Wan,) trying to clear his own name of suspicion in her disappearance, uncovers a wild conspiracy theory that might just hold the answer: Hanako's disappearance in 1979 might have been the first in a series of abductions of young Japanese men and women by North Korean forces. Francis Turnly's The Great Wave takes us from 1979 to 2003 in Japan and North Korea, which is indeed where Hanako is.

Theatre review: Yellow Face

The temporary auditorium outside the National Theatre was meant to have closed by now, but its success has led to an extension of its lifespan by a few years. What hasn't been as long-lived is the name The Shed, which seems to have been caught up in a copyright muddle, and as a result the venue doesn't currently have a name. That won't do, so until the National come up with a better suggestion, I'm going to call the big red wooden box Keith. Keith's first show is David Henry Hwang's semi-autobiographical Yellow Face, about a late-'90s witch hunt against Chinese-Americans, largely forgotten as 9/11 soon provided a new source of racial paranoia. The story starts a few years earlier and, having won a Tony for his play M. Butterfly, Hwang was one of the most prominent Asian-Americans on Broadway around the time Miss Saigon came to town, bringing with it Jonathan Pryce in yellowface.