Review: The Comfort Woman (King's Head Theatre)

Review by Dan Sinclair

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Between 1932 and 1945, Imperial Japanese forces took up to 200,000 young women and girls from Korea and other East Asian territories and forced them into places they termed ‘comfort stations’. Still unresearched and under-recognised, it is one of the largest and most disturbing cases of mass sexual slavery the world has seen. Minjeong Kim’s debut play, The Comfort Woman seeks to tell this story and raise awareness for the plight of these women.

Staged by Gaia House Productions, they bring this piece of exciting new writing to the King’s Head Theatre for two performances. Inspired by the stories of survivors such as Kim Hak-Sun and Lee Yong-soo, we see the lives of these girls who were forcibly taken by the Japanese military. We open in a peaceful Korea, Minjeong Kim plays a 13-year-old girl, who plays with her friends, sneaks alcohol away from her parents when she thinks they’re not looking and is in love with a local boy. This all changes when one day she is approached by a man who offers her a job in a factory in Japan. Thrown in the back of a closed truck with her friend, she is taken to a comfort station in Manchuria and given a new Japanese name - Akira. She is told that her purpose is to serve the Imperial Japanese soldiers, and somehow survive. The Comfort Woman is a powerful and often harrowing depiction of the events that happened in these camps and the shocking treatment 200,000 women received at the hands of the military machine. 

The highlight of this one-woman show is an epic physical performance from Minjeong Kim. It’s fitting that it’s staged in the King’s Head Theatre, a venue forever tied to the work of Steven Berkoff, as Kim gives a performance to rival that of Berkoff. She effortlessly captures an array of figures in this story with such precision. I think now of the officer running the station, her cheeks sucked in, face gaunt and a simple flick of a cigarette creates this character with complete clarity. In conversational scenes between multiple characters, she glides between these figures she’s created to completely convince an audience that they are watching a 10-strong cast. 

While The Comfort Woman has an undeniably moving story, the script could’ve done with some tightening. A few choices left me scratching my head: a climactic scene has two characters attempting to take their own life by downing a bottle of alcohol, a plan that seems confusing in a world full of escape attempts and soldiers with weaponry. Most problematic is a reveal that hangs on the doctor's announcement of a baby's gender whilst still in the womb, something that was not physically possible until the use of ultrasound scans in the 1970s. Small knots like this let down Minjeong Kim’s otherwise strong script. 

The Comfort Woman is an undeniably affecting staging of a disturbing and evil moment in human history. As a play, it lacks any form of light, but this is mainly because it is still an unresolved issue. The Japanese Government have yet to issue a sincere and official apology to the women affected, and only a handful of survivors are still with us. With some tweaking to the script, this is a strong debut from Minjeong Kim and a story that needs to have a successful life beyond this run. 

The Comfort Woman is showing at King’s Head Theatre until 25th September.

Tickets from: https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/the-comfort-woman/book