At Summerhall in Edinburgh, Tether 인연 brings together Scottish ceilidh and Korean ganggangsullae in a production that crosses languages, generations and countries, with the Guardian review tracing the show back to a chance meeting during a previous Edinburgh fringe between Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse of Scotland’s Wonder Fools and Yoon Junghwan of South Korea’s Theatre San.
Crossing Lines, Not Drawing Them
The production’s story spans 60 years and three generations, and it does so by following people whose lives are shaped by movement, separation and return. Hyeon-kyu Choi, a Korean missionary in inter-war Glasgow, falls for the landlady’s daughter, Molly Bryson, before being forced to return home. That forced return sits at the centre of the story’s emotional machinery. It’s a reminder that movement is never neutral when states get to decide who stays, who leaves and who gets to build a life where they’ve landed.
A generation later, the show shifts to Naomi Stirrat, a Scottish nurse tending wounded soldiers on the battlefield of the Korean war while carrying a letter from her heartbroken mother. The review gives the scene its own weight, but the facts themselves are blunt enough: war scatters people, and ordinary lives get drafted into the machinery of states and armies. The letter travels with her. The violence does the rest.
Then comes Mi-soo Kim, a 1970s Korean student visiting Scotland, who is amazed to find that Isabella Jarrett, the same landlady’s daughter, knows all the words to Arirang. The review presents that moment as one of the show’s pleasures, a small bridge across time and place. It’s also a neat rebuke to the official habit of treating cultures as sealed boxes, as if people don’t keep making connections across the lines governments love to police.
Movement, Language, and Shared Freedom
The review says the show’s joy lies less in its lightly drawn story than in the charm of the performances and the exuberant staging. The actors speak in their own tongue and the language changes by the line. That shifting speech matters. It refuses the neat administrative fantasy of one language, one nation, one obedient public. Instead, the production lets difference stay visible and audible.
Audience members are invited on stage for the Gay Gordons and Strip the Willow, and the review describes the piece as a collision between ceilidh and ganggangsullae, a Korean circle dance. The connections are made through a shared love of movement and physical freedom. No border guard can file that away neatly. No ministry can stamp it into a single category. It’s a performance built on contact, not control.
The score by Stuart Ramage is backed by an excellent four-piece live band playing folk instruments from both cultures. That detail gives the production its own kind of politics: not the politics of a ministerial statement or a funding announcement, but the politics of people making something together across inherited divisions. The review doesn’t dress it up as a manifesto. It doesn’t need to.
Summerhall, Later This Month
The show is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August. For now, the stage holds a story of migration, war, return and recognition, with ceilidh and circle dance meeting in the same room. The state’s preferred language is usually paperwork, permission and forced movement. This production answers with bodies, music and a room full of people moving together.