Characters: The Hashimoto Family and Their Captors
A Family Divided by a Coastline
Francis Turnly’s characters in The Great Wave carry the weight of a documented historical event. They are not simply dramatic constructs — they are theatrical representations of a human situation that was real for many families along Japan’s western coast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Understanding how to perform and design these characters requires understanding both their individual psychology and their structural function in the parallel storylines. Every character exists on at least two levels: as a human being with specific desires and fears, and as an embodiment of a political relationship between two states.
Hanako: The Anchoring Figure
Hanako is 17 when she is abducted. She is the play’s central figure but also, by design, its most constrained: the physical fact of captivity means she rarely initiates action. Her dramatic arc is internal — the slow, painful accommodation to a life she did not choose, and the question of whether accommodation equals surrender or survival. A performer playing Hanako across the play’s full timeline faces one of the most demanding tasks in the GCSE set-play canon: communicating 24 years of interior change through vocal interpretation and physical evolution, without the luxury of a narrator explaining the psychological shifts.
In the early captivity scenes, a performer might play Hanako with a fast, shallow breath pattern — higher pitch, clipped phrasing, physical restlessness. She paces: she is young, frightened, disoriented. A decade later, the same performer must communicate containment without defeat. A slower pace of speech, longer pauses before responding to her captors, a more upright but very still posture — the body has learned economy, not submission. The key performance challenge is distinguishing accommodation from defeat; Hanako survives precisely because she internalises rather than breaks.
Hanako is the play’s emotional centre across two decades. A performer must track her ageing through specific vocal and physical changes rather than relying on costume or make-up alone: pace of speech, range of movement, and the quality of stillness are the primary tools.
Reiko: The Advocate
Reiko is Hanako’s older sister, and the last person to see Hanako before the abduction. Her arc is the inverse of Hanako’s: where Hanako is confined and controlled, Reiko becomes increasingly active, increasingly public. She refuses the easy conclusion — that Hanako drowned — and her refusal drives the Japanese storyline. A performer playing Reiko must chart a different kind of psychological journey: from grief-stricken teenager to determined adult campaigner, without losing the underlying guilt of their last argument.
In the early scenes, Reiko’s physicality might be collapsed, withdrawn, directed downward — the proxemics of grief. A performer might keep her consistently downstage right, nearer the audience but turned slightly away from the other family members — present but unreachable. In the later scenes, her energy redirects into forward motion and direct eye contact: she stands upstage centre and addresses other characters (or, in moments of direct appeal, the audience itself) with a sustained, level gaze. The posture opens, the volume increases, the pacing quickens when bureaucratic silence is confronted.
Etsuko: The Mother
Etsuko, the mother, undergoes the most visible ageing across the play. She begins as an anxious parent in middle age and ends as an elderly woman whose grief has become the shape of her life. For a costume designer, Etsuko presents an opportunity to communicate temporal change through fabric and silhouette: a domestic, practical mid-layer in the early scenes — apron, layered cottons, a dark headscarf — might give way, scene by scene, to heavier, darker fabrics that seem to weigh the body down. Hair and make-up contribute here: progressively lighter powder, more drawn lines around the eyes, slower application of movement.
For a lighting designer, Etsuko’s scenes in Japan offer the opportunity to use a warm but increasingly low-intensity lighting wash to suggest domestic space becoming emotionally colder over time. The colour temperature of the Japan sequences might shift imperceptibly from amber to a neutral white over the course of the play — so subtle that the audience feels the change before they can name it.
A common performance error for Etsuko is to play her as uniformly sad from the start. This flattens the arc. In the early scenes, Etsuko may be partly in denial — performing domestic normality — which means a performer might actually increase the pace and volume of her housekeeping activities, her insistence on routine, as a defence against grief. The breaks in this routine — the moments she stops mid-task and simply stands still — carry the greater emotional weight precisely because the activity around them has been lively. A Stanislavskian approach to Etsuko means identifying her given circumstances precisely for each scene: where is she in the emotional timeline? What does she still believe at this point? What has she been told? Has she yet seen the government’s documentation? Each answer changes what the body and voice do.
Kum-Chol and the Question of the Captor
Kum-Chol becomes Hanako’s husband in North Korea. He is one of the most demanding characters in the play to perform because Turnly resists making him simply a villain. He is complicit in a state crime, but he is also recognisably human: he has loyalties, beliefs and, perhaps, moments of doubt. A performer playing Kum-Chol must avoid the trap of playing ideological certainty as blankness. The most interesting choices for this character involve gestus — the specific way his body communicates his relationship to institutional authority. He stands a particular way when reading official orders; he moves differently when alone with Hanako. These physical contrasts are where performance becomes analysis.
Jung Sun and the Teaching Scenes
Jung Sun is a North Korean assigned to learn Japanese from Hanako. The relationship that develops between them is the play’s most nuanced portrayal of what coercion does to human bonds. She is not free either — both of them are in the grip of the same state machinery — but his situation is different. For a director, the teaching scenes are among the most choreographically rich in the play: two people sitting across a table, both pretending a neutrality neither feels, in a space that is simultaneously a classroom and a prison. The proxemics here carry enormous weight. A director might begin with the performers at maximum downstage distance from each other and have them gradually, scene by scene, reduce that distance — a physical narrative of reluctant trust.
The play’s character relationships are built on constrained proximity: nearly every significant pairing is between people in unequal power positions. Proxemics — the distance between performers and whether it changes — is the most direct way to communicate these power dynamics in staging.
Students frequently describe Hanako as ‘sad’ or ‘broken’ throughout the play and treat this as a sufficient performance analysis. It is not. The specific vocal and physical journey from frightened teenager to quietly resilient adult requires different, concrete choices at different points in the timeline. ‘Sad’ is an emotion; what matters is how you would embody it: lowered volume, longer inhalations before speaking, a reduced gestural range, avoidance of direct eye contact with authority figures. And crucially, these choices must change across the timeline — not because Hanako becomes happy, but because her psychological strategy evolves. A student who tracks this evolution scene by scene, with specific choices, is writing at the highest level.