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: Harajuku Girls

Irish-Japanese playwright Francis Turnly tackles one of the less salubrious stereotypes about Japan in Harajuku Girls. Tokyo teenager Mari (Haruka Abe) is about to finish high school, and hopes to go to the national theatre school in the new term. As she waits for her results she spends her free time in her favourite way: Dressing up in Sailor Moon cosplay and going to Jingu Bridge in the Harajuku district, where tourists take photos of the girls in costumes. When her father forbids her from going on her drama course and demands she find an office job, Mari decides to fund it herself, and her hobby could turn into a money-spinner: She follows her best friend Keiko (Elizabeth Tan) to an "image club," a quasi-brothel where girls dress as cops, schoolgirls and anime characters, renting out their time to middle-aged salarymen who want to act out their fantasies.