Staging and Design: Sea, State Apartment and Searchlight
Two Worlds on One Stage
The design challenge of The Great Wave is fundamental: how do you put Japan and North Korea on the same stage without either location feeling vague? Turnly’s play demands a design language that can differentiate between two politically and emotionally distinct worlds, often within the same scene transition. The solution most productions reach for is not naturalistic scene-painting but a split staging strategy: a stage divided so that the Japanese household and the North Korean compound can each claim a permanent location, with lighting doing the work of telling the audience where they are.
For a staging configuration, an end-on or thrust stage both offer advantages for this play. A thrust configuration brings the audience close to both worlds simultaneously, collapsing any comfortable distance between spectator and the injustice they are watching — a Brechtian effect even in a predominantly naturalistic production.
The two locations demand contrasting design vocabularies: Japan evokes domestic warmth and coastal openness — natural light, timber, the blue-grey of the sea. North Korea evokes state control — flat, harsh overhead light, institutional walls, the absence of the natural world. Every design choice should be readable as belonging to one or the other.
Lighting Design: From Coastal Softness to State Searchlight
The Japan scenes can be lit with a warm amber-tinted lighting wash that evokes domestic interior light and coastal afternoon. For the North Korean compound, the design logic shifts entirely. A harsh overhead rig — profile lanterns angled steeply downward, producing sharp shadows — communicates institutional control without a single piece of dialogue. Hanako is surveilled; the light does not flatter or warm, it locates and exposes.
The “searchlight” image referred to in the play’s design history extends this logic: a tight lighting special that picks out a performer centre stage, surrounded by darkness, functions as both interrogation lighting and a visual metaphor for isolation. A gobo patterned with a window-frame or horizontal bars, projected across Hanako’s body, makes her captivity legible without any set-piece prison construction.
A common student error is to write: “I would use cold blue lighting for the North Korea scenes to show it is cold and unfriendly.” Much more than this is needed. Specify: which lantern type (profile spots for hard-edged shadows; Fresnels for a softer, more diffused chill), what intensity (70% rather than full, so the actors are readable but the environment feels leached of warmth), what colour gel (a Lee 201 “Full C.T. Blue” or similar cold wash), and what directional angle (steep top-light creates institutional surveillance rather than the enveloping cold of a side or front wash). Each specific choice carries meaning; a generic description carries none.
Sound Design: Waves and Propaganda
The play’s soundscape moves between two very different audio environments. The Japan scenes carry the sound of the sea — waves that begin as natural beach noise and gradually, across the play, become something the family has to choose to hear or not. A sound designer might position the sea sound binaurally (from the sides of the auditorium) in early scenes, then bring it to a mono centre speaker in later scenes, as if the sea has retreated into memory.
The North Korean compound scenes can be underscored by institutional sound — a low, steady drone that belongs to the building, not to nature; or, more specifically, by occasional fragments of state propaganda broadcast — distant music, an announcer’s voice — that arrive not as dramatic set-pieces but as background texture, as ordinary as traffic. This is the sound of a system that does not need to shout because it is simply the air you breathe. A soundscape underscore of this kind is more unsettling than a dramatic sound cue precisely because it feels unremarkable.
The sea functions as a controlling sound motif: it begins the play (the beach storm where Hanako disappears) and it is always available to the sound designer as a marker of the original loss. In the North Korean scenes, the absence of the sea — or its replacement by state sound — measures how far Hanako has been taken from herself.
Set Design: Minimalism Across Decades
Because the play covers 24 years and two countries, a realistic naturalistic set would require constant scene changes and would slow the play’s momentum fatally. Turnly’s play calls for a minimalist set: a stage that holds both locations simultaneously, with a handful of key elements that can be rearranged or relit to signal transitions. A low platform levels structure can separate the domestic Japanese household at one depth from the clinical compound surfaces at another, without a scene change.
Projections on the cyclorama can carry the sea without requiring a physical construction: a rolling ocean image projected behind the Japan scenes gives way to a blank institutional wall in the North Korean compound sequences. This also allows the projection to evolve — the sea becoming stormier or calmer — in response to the emotional arc of the family’s scenes.
Costume: Decade, Culture, Coercion
Costume in The Great Wave carries enormous narrative load because it must show the passage of decades (1979 to 2003) and the erasure of Hanako’s Japanese identity within the North Korean state. The design must signal two things simultaneously: the historical period (1980s Japanese civilian clothing moves through decades) and the institutional pressure on identity (Hanako’s costume in North Korea becoming less her own over time — more muted, more uniform, less personal).
For the Japanese family scenes, costume colour and silhouette can reflect period fashion while also tracking emotional states: Etsuko’s palette might grow greyer as the years pass, her costume gradually losing the bright accent colours of the early scenes. For Hanako in captivity, a DPRK-inflected institutional grey or khaki — plain fabric, functional cut — replaces the personal clothing of the beach scene. The contrast between what she wore at 17 and what she wears a decade later can be read by the audience as the visual measure of what she has lost.
Design choices only work if the performer engages with them. A performer playing Hanako in the compound scenes can use proxemics to reinforce the costume’s meaning: keeping a formal, controlled distance from officials, never allowing her body to claim the space as her own — the body contained within the uniform rather than inhabiting it. When Hanako has a rare private moment, a small physical release — dropping the shoulders, letting the hands open — can signal the self that still exists underneath the institutional costume. These micro-choices are what separate a performance that merely wears the costume from one that lives in it.