The tagline for this startlingly intense Verity Bargate playwriting award winner talks of an Anglo‑Korean model, adopted young by an English couple, returning to Seoul to seek her brother. With this information, it’s erroneously easy to envisage a limited set of ensuing circumstances. There will, we are sure, be an uneasy reunion framed by a culture clash.
There is, but much more besides, as writer In-Sook Chappell takes Miso (a bold turn from Jennifer Lim) and brother Han (Mo Zainal) to some very dark places. Attractive Miso looks like the archetypal London It girl but is actually a deeply indebted Without It girl, which is no use for Han, desperately in need of cash.
Yet as Chappell and director Lisa Goldman so efficiently suggest, this is a city where sex and money drive everything, and so long as you can offer one of the two, a warped kind of salvation might be at hand.
The ending doesn’t convince and questions are unanswered but what compels is the sense of the toxic cocktail of guilt and grief that Miso has been drinking for 25 years.
Until 7 March (020 7478 0100, www.sohotheatre.com).
This Isn't Romance
Soho Theatre
Dean Street, W1D 3NE
