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A Scottish woman sings Arirang. A Korean man dances in a\u00a0ceilidh. Both words were new to me \u2013 the first a traditional Korean folk song; the second a traditional Scottish gathering that features\u00a0group dancing \u2014 but both quickly felt familiar, rather than foreign, in \u201cTether,\u201d a remarkable collaboration between Scotland\u2019s Wonder Fools and South Korea\u2019s Theatre SAN. \u201cTether\u201d presents a romantic,\u00a0 bi-lingual,\u00a0cross-cultural, multigenerational saga in a lively, tuneful, often humorous production. It is also unusually\u00a0accessible: There are captions in English and Korean for every moment and at every performance.<\/p>\n
The bittersweet tale of love and loss that \u201cTether\u201d tells in three different years \u2013 jumping back and forth between 1918, 1951 and 1970 \u2013 might have been dramatized with more clarity. But the acting, the dancing, the singing and the palpable sense of connection made the show a highlight of this year\u2019s Edinburgh Festival Fringe for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The cast members were already dancing, backed by a live four-piece band, as I entered the theater, and they apparently had\u00a0\u00a0been grabbing members of the audience to dance with them. (I took a seat in a back row.) The dancing makes way for Jane (Isabella Jarrett), in Glasgow, singing that Arirang; a visitor from Korea asks her how she knows Korean \u2013 and the story begins. We go back in time to meet Dae Han (Hyeon-kyu Choi),\u00a0\u00a0a young Christian missionary from Korea, who has arrived in Glasgow\u00a0\u00a0in 1918 to study, choosing that city\u00a0\u00a0because it was the birthplace of the first person to translate the Bible into Korean. There he meets a young Jane (Molly Bryson), the daughter of his landlord. They clash at first; she teases him. But they eventually bond deeply over their mutual love of folk music. It is a love that lasts for decades, but only in absentia. He soon returns to Korea to join in the fight against Japanese rule.<\/p>\n
In 1951,\u00a0\u00a0during the Korean War,\u00a0Jane\u2019s daughter Nancy has traveled to Korea to work as a nurse, armed with a letter for Dae Han. In 1970, it\u2019s Dae Han\u2019s granddaughter who travels to Glasgow to meet Jane. It\u2019s a quirk of this production, and a factor in audience confusion over the timeline, that Jane ages (she becomes\u00a0Isabella Jarrett), while Dae Han looks the same no matter what the year (he is portrayed throughout by\u00a0Hyeon-kyu Choi, without any adjustment in makeup or hair.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ll likely most remember about \u201cTether\u201d are the melding of Scottish and Korean folk music, and in particular the moment when a Korean man sang \u201cAuld Lang Syne\u201d and it was the freshest and most moving rendition I\u2019ve ever heard \u2013 all the more meaningful because we\u2019ve learned\u00a0that\u00a0Aegukga,\u00a0the\u00a0Korean national anthem, shares the same melody.\u00a0<\/p>\n