Practitioner Application: Documentary Theatre and Brecht
A Play Between Two Traditions
Any production of The Great Wave must make a fundamental directorial decision: how much does it lean into its documentary theatre roots, and how much does it employ Brechtian distance? These are not mutually exclusive — in practice, the most powerful productions of the play hold both simultaneously. But understanding each tradition separately helps a director and designer make deliberate, informed choices rather than accidental ones.
Francis Turnly spent six months researching the DPRK abductions. This research heritage means that the play carries what documentary theatre scholars call an ethical obligation to the real: the events depicted happened to identifiable people. At the same time, Turnly is a dramatist, not a journalist, and The Great Wave is not a verbatim play. It uses the tools of dramatic art — composite characters, shaped scenes, theatrical climax — to communicate the truth of the abductions in a way that a simple documentary record cannot.
Documentary theatre (including verbatim theatre at its purest) uses the actual words, documents, or testimonies of real people. The Great Wave is not verbatim — Turnly has shaped and fictionalised — but its documentary roots give it the weight of the real: a strong answer understands that the play engages with documented historical events (the DPRK abductions, the 2002 Pyongyang Declaration) rather than treating it as pure fiction.
Brecht: The Audience as Witness
Bertolt Brecht’s approach to political theatre rested on a fundamental conviction: audiences who are lost in emotional identification with characters on stage are not thinking. He developed a range of techniques designed to interrupt this identification and return the audience to critical awareness. His term for the distancing effect produced by these techniques was the Verfremdungseffekt, often translated as the “alienation effect” or “estrangement effect.”
For The Great Wave, the Brechtian frame is powerful because the play is about a political crime: the DPRK abductions are not a private tragedy but a state act, and Turnly wants the audience to understand them as such. A director who applies Brechtian thinking might use direct address at key structural moments — a scene might pause, a character might step out of the fiction to address the audience as though they are witnesses rather than spectators. Projected titles (dates, locations, the number of confirmed abductees) can interrupt scenes to insist that this is not just a story but a documented event.
Brecht’s concept of gestus is directly applicable to the power dynamics of The Great Wave. The officials who oversee Hanako’s captivity can be staged with a gestus that makes their social role unmistakable: a particular upright bearing, a way of occupying the stage that signals authority without requiring it to be stated. Kum-Chol, Hanako’s husband in North Korea, is a character Turnly renders as recognisably human — but a Brechtian directorial choice might use gestus to ensure the audience always reads the role he plays in the system, even in his most sympathetic moments.
While Brechtian techniques work powerfully for the play’s political argument, the role of Hanako cannot be reduced to a gestus. Her 24-year journey demands what Stanislavski’s method offers: a detailed understanding of the character’s given circumstances (what has been taken from her, what she still has), her objectives at each moment (to survive, to preserve herself, to find some form of connection), and her relationship to the other characters as real psychological encounters rather than symbolic positions.
The teaching scenes with Jung Sun are the clearest example. These scenes depend on the audience sensing a genuine emotional shift in Hanako — something approaching warmth, however provisional — even within captivity. A Brechtian approach alone would flatten this. Stanislavski’s attention to given circumstances (what does Hanako know, what does she need, what is the emotional history between these two people?) gives the performer the tools to make that warmth specific and earned. The result is a production that can be politically clear (Brechtian) and emotionally true (Stanislavskian) at the same time.
The Ethical Dimension: Staging Real Victims
Because The Great Wave is based on real people’s experiences, any production carries an ethical responsibility that a fully invented play does not. A Brechtian directorial approach can honour this: rather than asking the audience to live through Hanako’s captivity as a fully immersive emotional experience (which would place us in the centre of her story), the Brechtian frame positions us as witnesses. We are asked to see clearly, to think, to judge — and perhaps to act. This is the didactic intent of political theatre: not to make audiences cry and go home, but to make them understand something they could choose to act on.
The most successful productions of The Great Wave use both practitioners: Stanislavski for the private emotional truth of Hanako and the family (so the audience cares); Brecht for the political frame (so the audience thinks and understands the systemic cause). The two approaches do not cancel each other out — they produce the complexity the play requires.
The Tanaka Household: Where Documentary Meets Domestic
The Japan scenes — the Tanaka family — offer a design and performance zone where the documentary and domestic meet. The design can be naturalistic enough to feel real (a Japanese domestic interior, period detail from the 1980s onwards) while the blocking and spatial arrangement reflect the Brechtian idea that every domestic arrangement is also a political one: who sits at the table, who stands, who approaches the officials. A tableau at a key moment — the family receiving news from the officials, frozen in the light — can function as both a Brechtian quotation mark (“look at this image”) and a moment of Stanislavskian emotional weight.
Many students believe that applying Brecht means the audience must not feel anything — that emotional engagement is the enemy of political thinking. This is a misreading of Brecht’s own practice. Brecht wanted audiences to feel; he wanted them to not be incapacitated by feeling. His techniques interrupt total identification at key moments — they do not prohibit warmth, sympathy or even grief. In The Great Wave, a production that generates no emotional response to Hanako’s situation will fail to communicate why the abductions are an injustice worth caring about. The Brechtian frame asks the audience to understand the systemic cause of their emotional response — not to switch it off.