New hit play in London gives a peek into North Korea

Chappell, born in South Korea and brought up in Britain, doesn’t directly touch on North Korea’s nuclear tests. But she takes us behind its regimented displays of military might into the suffering of citizens who have lived through decades of international sanctions, isolation and malnutrition. She was inspired to write the play after visiting the eerie demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and hearing accounts from North Korean refugees of the starvation and brutal treatment they 

had endured. 

To try to make her difficult subject accessible to a Western audience, Chappell said she decided to root it in “a very simple love story” between a hero and heroine wrenched apart by the North Korean regime. The Finborough Theatre typically rejects scripts based on conventional love stories as too hackneyed, but it made an exception for a play that uses a romance as a way into a deeper political drama. 

“I want people to be entertained, but I guess I want them to question how this is allowed to continue,” Chappell said. 

It’s a question the world is asking. Whether the huge explosive Pyongyang fired off really was an H-bomb.