The Apology dramatises the little-known yet wide-scale rape of Korean women and girls during the second world war. We are told that “history is made up of lone voices” and it comes filtered through a single woman’s testimony here. Sun-Hee (Sarah Lam), remembers how at the age of 16, living under Japanese occupation, she was persuaded to join the apparently “patriotic” female volunteer corps.
She was in fact being forced into military sex slavery for Japanese troops, who gave their victims the label of “comfort women”. In a play based on true accounts by survivors, Sun-Hee first comes forward to speak to Priyanka (Sharan Phull), an envoy compiling a report for a UN inquiry. Her interviews become the framing device of Kyo Choi’s shocking and intelligent if rather loose script.
Under Ria Parry’s direction, there is great power in Sun-Hee’s account, gradually tying together a seemingly separate storyline of a father (Kwong Loke) and daughter (Minhee Yeo). It takes the various parts of this play some time to join up and we find ourselves waiting but the cast is strong across the board. Loke gives an especially emotional performance as the father, Han Min, who is implicated in past crimes and eaten up by his guilt. His complications are brilliantly explored in Choi’s script.
There are sparks of excellence in the expressionistic scenes of violence, with the use of movement as well as a haunting, headless mannequin. Jamie Lu’s soundtrack rattles with dread and disturbance, and there is a dark mood of secrecy to TK Hay’s clean white set. Also powerful is the staging of Sun-Hee’s flashbacks in which the older woman interacts – sometimes spikily – with the younger version of herself who is trapped in a “comfort station”.
What hampers its dramatic flow and intensity is the overbearing framing device which brings combative (and sometimes oddly flirtatious) conversations between Priyanka and a too oily, unsympathetic American diplomat, Jock (Ross Armstrong). These give the play its wider intellectual and geopolitical context, including the subsequent political cover-up, and through Jock we learn that American GIs were complicit with the culture of “comfort women”. But he is a one-tone “baddie”, given too much air time, it seems, and their debates not only bring big tonal shifts but circularity and repetition.
But the good moments are very good indeed. Presented by New Earth Theatre in association with the Arcola and the North Wall, this is ultimately an important play about a wretched instance of under-reported history for which no adequate official apology has yet come.
At the Arcola, London, until 8 October
