The most beautiful thing about returning to the Riverside Studios for an evening performance at this time of the year is the stunning sunset just behind the iconic Hammersmith Bridge – and the illuminations over the river Thames are also worth a look when you leave the studios again. Last summer I saw the daring and excellent pulp rock show Tarantino Live here, and made good use of the choice of riverside pubs around us before the generally underrated extravaganza.
After a successful run at the Park Theatre near Finsbury Park, Kim’s Convenience has now returned for an eight weeks run to London – firstly performed at the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival, it is the fourth time that Esther Jun directs this one-act play. The Riverside Studios embrace it not only with the photo exhibition Our Store Your Story, but also with an in-house convenient store located in the foyer, stacked with Korean consumer packaged goods, encouraging tonight’s full house to snack during the performance. Bugger, I wish I had not arrived with a dinner filled tummy tonight. But I arrive early enough to read the very informative program from the first to the last page: Playwright Ins Choi is starring as Kim, a Korean corner shop owner somewhere in Canada who has given up his teaching career in his home country in hope to enable a better life for his children. This means no real weekends, no paid holidays and instead selling chilled drinks, peanuts and scratch cards – a lot of autobiographical content. But Kim’s adult son turned away from the family years ago, the unmarried daughter became a photographer instead of a doctor, the wife still finds support in the hymns at the Korean Church but knows it will be shut down soon, and opposite the small store a massive Walmart is about to be built. Kim is reflecting and brooding, profiling customers for the likelihood of them being thieves, and reports illegal parking observed from his shop window (but only if it is a Japanese car) – a victim of racism himself, his survival strategies are funny but rarely politically correct, and embarrass especially his adult daughter Janet. She is not interested in taking over the shop or to convert it into a Kim Horton’s (not enough laughter for this one from the Hammersmith audience), and has valid reasons not to get her father close to her dates. Kim’s Convenience is a humorous, heartfelt but serious play which is consciously neither cynical nor mean but instead dedicated to the well-meaning imperfection all cross-generational families and migrations are.
Along with a brief cultural history about Korea and the UK since 2011, the printed program includes a sharp glossary with the title “The Invisibility of East and South East Asians in British Theatre, or, and A to Z to seeing yellow” which I am likely to keep for references for quite a while. Written by actor, writer and theatre maker Vera Chok, the 26 paragraphs point out the traps of oversimplifications when elaborating on cross-continental casts, social survival, and specific challenges citizens, actors and other creatives from all over Asia face elsewhere – it is the first time that I read about the bamboo ceiling, and it is clear immediately what it means. Chok is not shying away from pointing out unacceptable practices like yellow-facing, whitewashing, colourism, tokenism or salaries in theatre in general – and admitting that even when unlearning habits with the best intentions (colour-blind casting for example as it does not work in the business of visual storytelling), mistakes are unavoidable. My favourite sentence is “Comedy is my favourite weapon for social change”, and there has been plenty of laughter tonight.
Ins Choi describes the play as a love letter to his own parents (who moved to Canada in 1975) and “to all first-generation immigrants who end up calling a foreign land, home.” Thank you. Thank you also for that fact about the nectarine.
**** out of five stars
Kim’s Convenience was written by Ins Choi and directed by Esther Jun
Played at the Riverside Studios until October, tickets from £23.50. The play will be staged again in Kingston’s Rose Theatre in March 2025
Sadie takes the Stage 