American Mia Chung’s 2012 play begins both grimly and comically. In a dimly lit room in North Korea, two sisters, one of them seriously ill, are sharing an inadequate meal, yet each goes to absurd lengths to encourage the other to be the one that eats. The humour isn’t enough to outweigh the bleakness in this phase, yet when the sisters get separated during an attempt to flee the country, the dominant tone becomes one of Lewis Carrollian surrealism.

Minhee, the elder and unwell sister who has fallen down a well, hallucinates her way through a version of North Korea which is brighter but scarcely more illogical and random than the real one: in this continuum she is employed picking kimjongilia flowers (which really exist: they’re a type of begonia), and slogs her way through to try to see her beloved son by engaging in the national activity of trying to out-threaten each other at every turn. Meanwhile, in intercut scenes, Junhee makes her way to America, gets a job in a hospital and makes friends… well, a friend… whilst saving to buy her sister’s freedom. Even the language spoken in each thread is correspondingly babblesome: Minhee engages in idealistic cant with those around her, whilst Junhee hears (out of the mouth of actor Daisy Haggard at 120 mph) wild torrents with the occasional vaguely English-ish syllable, which become more intelligible as (we infer) Junhee’s own English improves. (There is, admirably, no Asian-broken-English speaking here.) Finally Minhee confronts the truth about her son and husband, and Junhee the fact that she will never fully integrate, and so sister returns to sister and the escape is repeated with a different outcome.

Katie Leung (of Harry Potter film fame) and Wendy Kweh make a compelling central couple as Junhee and Minhee respectively. Richard Twyman’s production is alert to every opportunity for the bizarre, from a kaleidoscopic rice ballet (honestly) to a man at a baseball match standing for the national anthem with his hand devoutly over his heart… in a giant foam pointing-finger glove. Jon Bausor’s geometrical, mirrored fold-out set is a wonder in itself as well as multiplying the weirdnesses and serving as a metaphor for the sisters’ comparative experiences: one set of illusions simply reflects the other.

Written for the Financial Times.