You for Me for You: New drama examines why not every North Korean wants to escape the country’s brutal dictatorship

Mia Chung has taken on what some would see as a daunting subject to create an exhilarating piece of work

Sisters Minhee (Wendy Kweh, left) and Junhee (Katie Leung) in 'You for Me for You' (Tristram Kenton)

It’s hard to know what daily life is really like inside North Korea. For some playwrights, that might make it a daunting subject – for Mia Chung, it was freeing. You for Me for You at the Royal Court in London, is no gritty realism or documentary theatre; in imagining the lives of two sisters who attempt to flee the country’s oppressive, secretive regime, Chung calls on magical realism. The result is an exhilarating, surreal roll through both North Korean and American society.

“I thought, I can’t write about [North Korea] – there’s no information,” Chung tells me; she lives between New York and San Francisco, but is over for rehearsals. “Then I thought, actually this is maybe ideal… As long as you don’t try to make it, ‘Oh this actually what happens’, almost anything is possible. I didn’t want to get the verisimilitude of life in North Korea; I wanted to get into their imagination, their psychology.”

You for Me... opens with the two sisters – Junhee (played by Harry Potter alumna Katie Leung) and Minhee (Wendy Kweh) – starving during one of North Korea’s famines. Junhee determines to smuggle them both out of the country. The border crossing becomes a metaphorical maelstrom – and while Junhee makes it across, Minhee gets trapped down a well. A visual image for how, mentally, she isn’t ready to make the leap: still partly loyal to her country and the regime, having swallowed the official narratives: “Our Dear Leader” loves her, North Korea is “the best nation in the world”, the West is full of “immoral” imperialists.

So while the play follows Junhee to New York, Minhee remains in dreamlike, subconscious limbo. Through this, Chung introduces the audience to comically surreal versions of the excruciating bureaucracy and black-market dealings of North Korea, as well as some of the true horrors of living under the regime, drawn from real defectors’ testimonials: starvation, disappearing relatives, horrific torture, public execution.

Chung was influenced by an unlikely-sounding true story, told in a BBC documentary. “A sister had smuggled herself out, and paid to get her younger sister smuggled out to Seoul, and the younger sister absolutely rejected everything and demanded to be smuggled back in.”

Then Chung read about the case of an American girl, Jaycee Dugard, who had been held hostage for 18 years. “She tried to defend her kidnapper – a really clear case of Stockholm syndrome. And that gave me the paradigm to look at North Korea: I feel like the government has kidnapped its people. It’s not an island, there’s something else that’s keeping people from leaving.”

Chung’s parents, a nuclear engineer and an entrepreneur both from South Korea (they met in New York after emigrating), always had a hard-line dismissal of the regime, expecting the system to collapse any moment. But soon Chung’s own question became, “Will this system ever fall part? Because the control is so tight, and the loyalty is very strong. Is it loyalty or fear? In some ways, it’s both.”

And her take on America, though fast and funny, isn’t quite a glorious land-of-the-free: Junhee is bewildered by the frenetic pace and rampant consumerism. “I can certainly understand arriving in Seoul or New York and rejecting the elitism, the commercialism,” muses Chung.

Junhee also faces the challenge of learning English – but Chung has “a really strong allergic reaction to hearing broken English done on stage,” she says with a laugh. She came up with a neat device: when Junhee gets to America, English-speakers sound like they’re talking total gobbledegook. The audience share her confusion, and as Junhee’s language skills improve, so odd English words and phrases break through.

The first draft of You for Me... was written in 2010 as a project in graduate school at Brown University; Chung had “wasted” several years writing “terrible” film scripts before realising plays were the thing. It was produced in Washington DC in 2012, but the current version is much re-drafted.

The play is on in the small Upstairs space at the Court – how on earth are they going to stage this continent-hopping story, with all its wildly imaginative moments? Sample stage directions include “One by one, the trees of the forest grow large ears” and “Minhee has entered the rice orchestra”.

Chung promises that director Richard Twyman and designer Jon Bausor have risen to the challenge. They’re taking inspiration from the “card stunts” of North Korea’s mass games, where vast crowds turn thousands of coloured cards to make enormous rippling images. “The Royal Court have assembled a team of creative geniuses,” she says. “Basically, Jon’s created a kaleidoscope.”

Chung considers London the theatre capital of the English-speaking world, and the Court a pinnacle for new writing. As for having her own work staged there; well, she describes it as being her own moment of “magical realism”.

‘You for Me for You’, Royal Court, London ,to 9 January (020 7565 5000)