Sora Baek’s solo show speaks truth to power, opening up the world of North Korean defectors to new audiences. It is a moving and tense portrayal of one girl’s bid to escape North Korea – not for her own gain, but to create money to send back home to pay for medication for her desperately ill mother.

There is a well-documented, $105 million dollar ‘industry’ to traffic North Korean women to China. Jisun, the protagonist of the piece, is a 15-year-old girl who is swept up into this world, but rejected by the men who hope to buy her once she arrives in China due to her undeveloped body, caused by malnutrition. The play follows Jisun as she crosses the river into China, with a group of other girls and the people smugglers who intend to sell Jisun, and how she survives in a world where she still holds on to her indoctrination through North Korean propaganda, harbouring a deep mistrust of those around her.

Baek’s performance is wonderful, supported masterfully by projections and sound to transport the audience first to North Korea and then to a bitter, Chinese winter. Baek deftly switches between the heroic Jisun and the other characters she meets, including several who speak Korean. Even without translation, the intentions of these characters are made abundantly clear in her nuanced performance – and perhaps deliberately slightly alienate audience members who do not speak Korean, mimicking Jisun’s own experience of arriving in China.

Baek herself grew up in South Korea, her father and his parents having fled North Korea as refugees when Baek’s father was just four years old. The story she tells, then, is one very close to home and this is abundantly clear in her must-see, powerful, compelling and enthralling performance.

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