Part of The Bomb: A Partial History – Second Blast season at the Tricycle Theatre
“Hungry as they are, they are proud to be North Korean and not American puppets”
Even within the constraints of a short piece of drama, playwrights often think and write big, but not always to the greatest effect, and so it felt a little bit with Diana Son’s Axis, one of the plays making up the second part of the Tricycle’s The Bomb – a partial history. Starting off in a White House strategy room, two advisers try to come up with a sexy soundbite that will help sell Dubya’s aggressive post 9/11 strategy, we then flip ten years into the future in North Korea where two members of the government discuss what things might be like under their new inexperienced leader Kim Jong-Un.
Both sections have their merits: the idea that something as powerful and definitive as the ‘Axis of Evil’ rhetoric is something that could have been whipped by speech-writers and spin doctors has a horribly persuasive currency but it felt a lost opportunity for the revelation that this policy threw away the considerable diplomatic efforts of the previous administration who had come close to buying out the North Koreans’ nuclear programme in exchange for aid to just be used as a post-script caption. And where the 2012 discussion of the huge uncertainty around their untried new leader does look at the repercussions of this hardening of the position on both sides, especially on worsening the poverty in North Korea, there’s an almost slapstick tone which undermined the seriousness of the subject.
Overall, Axis felt like the beginnings of something interesting that could potentially be excellent but didn’t quite have the right level of effectiveness in its current form – the frustration coming because so much of what it needed is in there, it just needs a little tweaking for me. Despite myself, I found Simon Chandler and David Yip’s Korean old guard members generally very funny and the piece as a whole was always easy to watch.
