Tether 인연

Tether is a fusion of Scottish and Korean traditional music and traditions, blending and merging the two in a sort of musical ballet. Its complex structure transports audiences between three temporalities and two languages, but still manages to keep the mellow pulse of everyday love running through all.

An ingeniously placed ceilidh is already underway as the audience arrive, with the cast pulling people onto the stage and teaching them dances which become part of the show. The cast are clearly having fun with this, a feeling carries through the whole performance. Even the rude interruption of Summerhall’s fire alarms could not knock that energy from the room.

From Glasgow to Korea, and from 1918 to 1951 to 1970, the story moves between Dae Han and Jane, Nancy and Min Guk, and Mi So and Jane. Korean, Scots and English all sit alongside one another, but language rarely feels like a barrier. In 1918, Dae Han meets Jane in Glasgow, while Sam Stopford's Reverend Milligan lectures on the joys of music and whisky; elsewhere, conversations about folk traditions and separation begin to reveal what really connects these worlds. It does take a little while to find the rhythm of who belongs where, though, with different actors appearing across different periods and occasionally making the temporal shifts difficult to follow. It does become clear.

The answer to that, is music. A row of Korean mixed with European instruments and instrumentalists line the back of the stage, as they shift between Korean folk music and ceilidh, often becoming the textured sound of the scenes themselves. The music is not simply accompaniment. It is the language of the play, something beyond Korean, English or even the occasional Scots turn. A conversation about Loch Lomond and its separation, alongside the idea of singing being something to “pass on”, makes that feel so more than a conceit. The music itself carries the histories into the moment of the action.

And it carries the love story alongside it. Molly Bryson and Hyeonkyu Choi are excellent as Jane and Dae Han, particularly in the tender scenes of love and care in 1918. Their connection is completely believable despite the incomprehensibility of understanding across different tongues, with the movement doing much of the work of making that connection visible. The movement in particular is superb, some of the slickest this Fringe, particularly when it entwines with trad rhythms. The love story traverses across the ages into Auld Lang Syne, as the younger and older versions of the characters occupy the same space and Burns’s song of reminiscing sits in tune with the play’s remembering. The accordion pulses with Korean rhythms as one memory folds into another.

Tether 인연 by Wonder Fools, Theatre SAN.