Themes: State Power, Identity, Family Loss
Staging What States Do to People
The Great Wave is a play about themes that cannot be separated from the historical events that generated them. State authoritarianism, identity under coercion, and ambiguous family loss are not abstract ideas in this play — they are things that happened to specific people. Turnly’s task as a playwright is to make these themes theatrically concrete: to find the staging choices, the performer actions, the design decisions that put state power on stage as something an audience can feel, not merely understand.
For a director approaching any of the play’s major themes, the fundamental question is always the same: how do you give abstract power a physical form? The answer in this play is through contained spaces, constrained bodies, and the soundscape of a state that is always present but never fully visible. The soundscape of The Great Wave — the sea that opens and closes the play, the propaganda music that pervades the North Korean sequences, the silence of diplomatic non-response in the Japanese government scenes — is itself a thematic argument about what states use sound to do: drown out, overwrite, and silence.
State Authoritarianism: Making Power Visible
The most distinctive staging challenge for the authoritarian theme is that the state in this play is largely invisible as a character. There is no single villain who embodies the DPRK regime. Instead, the state is present as architecture: the room Hanako is kept in, the table across which she is interrogated, the formal distance between officials in the diplomatic scenes. A set designer approaching the North Korean sequences might choose a minimal, geometrically precise set — a single overhead light source, a table, two chairs at equal distance — to suggest a world governed by system rather than feeling.
The use of levels in the staging of interrogation and official scenes is a powerful tool for communicating power asymmetry. An official seated at a raised platform while Hanako stands downstage at floor level places the power relationship into the geometry of the space before a word is delivered. A prop as symbol — a dossier, a photograph, a piece of documentation — passed between officials but withheld from Hanako communicates bureaucratic dehumanisation through a simple physical action that any audience member can read immediately.
State power in The Great Wave has no single face. It is staged as architecture and procedure: geometric set design, level asymmetry, controlled lighting states and the bureaucratic prop. A director who makes the space feel like a system communicates authoritarianism more effectively than any villainous performer could.
Identity under Coercion: Language, Name, History
Hanako’s abduction is not simply a physical confinement. She is required to adopt a new name, learn a new language, and accept a new history. The identity-erasure theme is one of the most theatrically rich in the play because it puts language itself on stage as a contested object. In the teaching scenes, Hanako teaches Japanese to North Korean students — but this means her own language, her own culture, her own self is being weaponised by the state. A performer can communicate this cognitive dissonance through subtle signals: a micro-pause before switching registers, a controlled breath at the moment she hears her birth name from a student who does not know its significance.
For a sound designer, the identity-erasure scenes offer the opportunity to use underscore to comment on the action. A quiet, fragmented Japanese folk melody underscoring the teaching scenes — too quiet for the characters to hear but audible to the audience — might signal Hanako’s retained inner life in the gaps between her official role. The moment this underscore cuts out could mark the point where the audience wonders whether she is losing hold of her former self.
Students sometimes treat ‘the great wave’ of the title as set decoration — a projected image of a Hokusai print, perhaps, to signal Japan. This misses the metaphor entirely. The wave is a force that moves people: it is the state, the abduction, the years of displacement, the surge of grief that cannot be resolved. A director who takes the wave seriously as a structural metaphor will return to it at key moments: the opening storm, the moment of abduction, the arrival of official news, the final scene. The sea soundscape might swell and recede at these moments, always just louder than comfort allows — a reminder that the force reshaping these lives has never stopped. A lighting designer might use a slow, rippling gobo effect (achieved with a profile lantern and a moving gobo wheel) to cast the stage periodically in fractured light, connecting specific moments of rupture across the timeline.
Ambiguous Loss and Family Endurance
The concept of ‘ambiguous loss’ — grief without closure, the mourning of someone who may or may not be alive — is the emotional engine of the Japanese storyline. Reiko and Etsuko cannot grieve in the conventional sense because they do not know whether Hanako is dead. This produces a particular kind of theatrical stillness in the domestic scenes: a hovering, unresolved quality that a director must handle very deliberately. The danger is that these scenes become passive. The task is to show that endurance is itself an action — a daily choice — not a state of waiting.
A lighting designer might use a lighting special for moments when Reiko or Etsuko is alone and speaks — or simply stands — in awareness of Hanako’s absence. This isolates the figure within the wider, dimmed scene and signals to the audience that what we are witnessing is an internal act. The rest of the stage dims but does not black out; the domestic world is still present, but the emotional focus has contracted to a single body holding loss.
Ambiguous loss is grief without certainty of death or closure. In the Japanese storyline, it produces theatrical stillness that must be actively staged — not as passivity, but as the visible effort of not knowing.
Complicity and Moral Compromise
The play does not allow its North Korean characters to be simply agents of evil. Kum-Chol is complicit in Hanako’s captivity but Turnly gives him interiority: his relationship with Hanako shifts across the play’s timeline in ways that complicate a simple moral reading. Complicity is a theme that is most powerfully staged through the tableau: a frozen configuration that holds two figures in an ambiguous spatial relationship — neither fully separated nor in comfortable proximity — can communicate the complexity of complicity more efficiently than dialogue. A tableau of Kum-Chol and Hanako, placed in the same frame but not looking at each other, with a wash of cold light pooling between them, says something about shared but asymmetrical captivity that a single speech cannot.
Students sometimes treat the diplomatic and official scenes as exposition — background information to help the audience understand the political context. This misreads the play’s thematic argument. The diplomatic scenes are where the theme of state power over individual life is made most explicit: these are the scenes in which the scale of institutional indifference to individual suffering is fully staged. A director who treats them as merely informational will miss the opportunity to use the performers’ bodies and the design environment to stage political silence as a kind of violence. Consider: what does a government official’s perfectly controlled, neutral vocal tone communicate to an audience that has just watched Hanako’s captivity? The contrast is the argument.