Plot and Structure: A Tale Across Two Countries
Two Worlds, One Stage
The Great Wave by Francis Turnly spans almost a quarter of a century — from 1979 to 2003 — across two nations that share a coastline but almost nothing else. The structural challenge Turnly sets himself is formidable: how do you tell a story in which two families live through the same event from opposite sides of a border, across two decades, without ever fully knowing the same facts? His answer is a rigorously disciplined cross-cutting structure that forces the audience into the uncomfortable position of knowing more than any single character ever does.
The play is structured in two acts. The first act establishes the catastrophic event at its centre — the abduction of Hanako from the coast of Japan by North Korean agents during a storm in 1979 — and then splits into its two parallel lines: Hanako in North Korea, and her family in Japan. The second act moves deeper into adulthood, into diplomacy and silence, and towards the Pyongyang Declaration of 2002, which acknowledged for the first time that such abductions had taken place. By choosing this two-act, twin-timeline structure, Turnly gives the audience a form that mirrors its content: separation, parallel endurance, and the impossibility of reunion that looks easy from the outside.
The play spans 1979 to 2003 across two parallel storylines: Hanako in North Korea (abducted as a teenager) and her family in Japan (searching, grieving, advocating). The twin timelines converge emotionally but almost never physically.
The Opening Beach Scene
The play opens during a storm at the Tanaka household. The stage directions foreground the Sea of Japan: its sound, scale and menace. The storm then frames the beach sequence in which Hanako disappears. For a director, the staging of this scene is one of the most consequential choices in the whole production. Working in an in-the-round configuration, the sea becomes a surround-sound presence rather than a painted flat: waves can come from all directions, making the audience feel the disorientation of the storm. In a more traditional proscenium arch configuration, the beach might be signalled by a raked stage, a strip of projected surf at the back, and a soundscape of crashing water that gradually overwhelms the sisters’ voices.
As a performer playing Reiko in this opening moment, the choices you make about posture and proximity signal the relationship before a word is spoken. Place Reiko upstage of Hanako and have her turn away as Hanako tries to speak — the physical distance communicates the argument’s emotional temperature before either line is delivered. As a sound designer, you might begin with a low, continuous underscore of distant waves, then swell the volume as the sisters’ argument reaches its peak, so that the sea literally drowns their voices at the moment of separation — a design choice that carries the controlling metaphor of the title into the audience’s ears.
Cross-cutting means the play shifts between its two storylines in alternating scenes rather than completing one before starting the other. In The Great Wave, Turnly cuts from Hanako’s captivity in North Korea to the Tanaka family in Japan and back again, sometimes within the same act. This structure creates dramatic irony — the audience knows Hanako is alive while her family does not — and it holds both truths simultaneously rather than letting the audience forget either one.
For a director, these transitions need a clear lighting state change at each cross-cut. A common approach is a sudden blackout followed immediately by a new state — colder in North Korea, warmer in Japan — so the audience registers the geography shift through temperature and colour before any dialogue confirms it. The costume of the performers can reinforce this: subdued utility fabrics and muted earth tones in the DPRK sequences; softer domestic textures and layered clothing in the Japanese family sequences.
Time Leaps and the Ageing Body
Because the play moves across more than two decades, the performers playing Hanako and her family must communicate ageing without realistic prosthetics. Turnly’s stage directions indicate time leaps through lighting changes, sound shifts and costume alteration. A blocking strategy commonly used to communicate ageing is to give a character a progressively reduced range of movement as years accumulate — a youthful Hanako who crosses the stage in a few quick strides becomes, a decade later, a figure who moves in deliberate, contained steps, her energy disciplined by years of captivity. This is not naturalistic ageing — it is a theatrical shorthand that makes the passage of time legible in the performer’s body.
For the audience, this physical storytelling across time is more powerful than any chronological caption could be. When Etsuko, the mother, is seen in two scenes separated by a decade, a lighting designer might shift from a warmer, amber-tinted state in the earlier scene to a cooler, lower-intensity wash in the later one — signalling not just time but emotional weathering. A gobo patterned to suggest window bars or a lattice might appear in the North Korean scenes to suggest confinement without building a cell.
Turnly signals time leaps through lighting state changes, costume alterations and sound cues rather than captions or narration. This places the burden of storytelling on design rather than exposition, which gives the audience an active interpretive role.
Epic Structure and Documentary Roots
The structure of The Great Wave belongs to the tradition of documentary theatre — a tradition associated with the Tricycle Theatre (now Kiln Theatre), which co-produced the play’s 2018 world premiere at the National Theatre’s Dorfman, directed by Indhu Rubasingham. Documentary theatre typically presents itself as evidence rather than fiction; even though The Great Wave has invented characters, its structural discipline — the dual timeline, the diplomatic scenes, the precision of its historical markers (1979, 1983, 2002, 2003) — signals to the audience that these events are rooted in documented fact.
This epic span puts the play in company with Brechtian epic theatre structure, in which scenes function as separate episodes each carrying their own meaning, rather than as links in a single causal chain. Brecht believed that episodic structure prevented the audience from becoming lost in emotional identification; they could stand back and witness the political argument being made. In The Great Wave, the cutting between Japan and North Korea achieves a similar effect: the audience cannot fully surrender to either storyline without being reminded that another, equally real world is running parallel to it.
A common student error is to describe the play as a family drama about Japanese grief and treat the North Korean sequences as background. This misreads the structure entirely. Turnly gives roughly equal stage time to both sides; the North Korean sequences are not backdrop but a parallel central story. Students who analyse only the Japanese family’s storyline miss the structural argument the play is making. The cross-cutting is the meaning. What the parallel structure demands of the audience is the emotional labour of holding both experiences at once — which is precisely what the abduction has denied the characters themselves.