Theatre review: Jaha Koo's Haribo Kimchi cooks up hearty serving of themes

Straits Times

3 days ago

Jaha Koo
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Aug 1, 8pm
The enduring image of this bittersweet telling of migration and the ways food both suffocates and stays on people's tongues may be its finale of a livestreamed gyrating robotic eel smartly shot from floor level. Or it could be of theatremaker Jaha Koo sprinting across the Esplanade Theatre Studio to hand out free Somaek (a mix of soju and beer).
The preceding mood the work conjures is damper, more controlled and meditative, reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting or Ryan Gosling steering the wheel in the film Drive (2011), with a toothpick in his mouth, backed by electronic synth music.
Koo turns mechanised overall loneliness and sadness into something more cosy with the setting of a South Korean late-night streetside food stall, or pojangmacha. Under its kimchi-red canopy and armed with a row of sauces, he is the stall operator – preparing a four-course meal for two members of the audience – in exchange for their listening ear. The stall doubles as a confessional , not for sins but the frustrating search for 'bliss point', used in food engineering to refer to that elusive perfect blend of flavours.
The pacing for this work is so well done that it manages to pack what feels like three-hours worth of material into its run-time at just slightly over a third of that, while still moving unflustered in that dilative ether night owls are familiar with.
Koo, in his amiable way, alternates his easy, direct narration in English with pre-recorded voiceovers in Korean, during which he cooks. There is high-key surrealism and absurdism throughout – he starts his story with finding a snail in his Costco bag which he duly takes home to ease his lonesomeness. Cue close-ups of the writhing molluscs on two portrait monitors he has set up next to the stall, which frequently displays footage of events from his point of view, including walking through airports and shutting taxi doors.
And so begins his irrepressible desire to uproot, to Berlin where the pungency of kimchi haunts him, and on to Brussels where he instinctively apologises and develops a sweet tooth for Haribo gummy bears.
Koo never belabours, offering only potent vignettes. He allows the dreamy videos and soundscapes to do a lot of the heavy-lifting. A composer, he also flexes his synth muscles in effective humorous interludes sung philosophically by the snail and the Haribo bear – both CGI-ed to move their lips – and the itinerant eel that lives in perpetual discomfort between fresh and salt water currents. The lighting up of the eel's head here in song is entirely analogue, delivering the all-important line that 'You can carry your roots with you/ routes are more important than roots'.
Where Haribo Kimchi is brilliant is in Koo's instinctive understanding of the need for bigger perspectives, and he gives food that gravity beyond the personal – kimchi turning red as a result of mediaeval changes in global temperatures, the proliferation of fried chicken stalls after the financial crisis reminding his father of the smell of corpses during the Gwangju democratic demonstrations in 1980.
Koo is also quite willing to allow the conversational lull for audiences to digest instead of the frantic pace of other one-person acts.
Within this quiet familiar to the East Asian urbanite, food is repressed emotion, labour, history, curse, and quirk – and just a dash of presentation and present circumstance. When the audience member eating his food praises his sauce, Koo replies: 'I bought it from the supermarket actually.'
In wielding theatre and its different tastes so easily, Koo himself comes dangerously close to bliss point. Even if he is still too proud to tackle fusion cuisines.
Book It/ Haribo Kimchi