Many may come to Kim’s Convenience, currently in the early stages of a UK tour, having seen the popular, five-season-long sitcom on Netflix. The show began life as a play at the Canadian Fringe in 2011, and, no doubt thanks to its later TV success, the stage version now has a new lease of life.
Much of the promotional material around this production refers to writer Ins Choi and how he wrote Kim’s Convenience as a “love letter to my parents and all first-generation immigrants who have made the country they have settled in their home.” In this case, a Korean family who moved to and settled in Canada.
The play shows a day in the life of Kim (James Yi) and his family. Director Esther Jun isn’t scared to allow room for Kim to slowly go about his routine of opening his store, packed to the gunnels with brightly coloured store cupboard essentials. He’s in no hurry to get the papers in, make his coffee and set up the till. As different customers come and go (all played by the versatile Andrew Gichigi), we begin to form a picture of the patriarch Kim: proud of his heritage, hardworking, stubborn, estranged from his son Jung (Daniel Phung) due to a past violent incident, and keen for his daughter Janet (Caroline Donica) to take over the store and forego her wish to become a photographer. He has views too on why she is 30 years old and still not married.
Much of the humour derives from the interactions between Kim and Janet, and then later when Alex (Gichigi) enters the fray and a relationship with Janet is ignited.
Kim’s wife Umma (Candace Leung) busies herself with the church, and it is there she meets Jung to try and repair the damage within the family following the altercation between father and son.
In this 75-minute play, Choi presents a tender story of a family just trying to get on, with the parents having sacrificed much to give their children the best life possible. Not far from the surface, however, tensions simmer and spill over: the weight of expectation between parents and children, racism and racial stereotyping, and immigrants’ experiences in their new lives in a different culture and environment.
The character of Kim is a familiar figure from many a sitcom: a cantankerous, domineering father, clinging on to the ways of the past as his children would see it, but working long hours to support his family. The day ends with the subtle passing on of the family baton.
The occasional farcical moments provide a good contrast to the confrontations and frustrations of the family’s experiences. A strength of this play is that not everything is explained. Umma and Kim’s exchanges are in Korean without translation; body language and tone say enough sometimes.