For their latest show, dreamthinkspeak invite audiences to a secret address in Hull. A disused office building has been transformed into the headquarters of the Kasang corporation, an imaginary South Korean outfit specialising in smart technologies designed to identify consumer habits and encourage us to spend more. The audience of about 40 are given “kpads” so they can shop in the company’s neon-lit mall and gain K points. As we do so, we unthinkingly reveal precious data about ourselves.
We get a chance to try virtual reality, and play a real-world version of one of the company’s successful online games. But, in a show played out over several floors of the building and an adjoining multi-storey car park, the game gradually turns nastier and darker. We find ourselves lost in a maze and suddenly transported to a police station where stony-faced officers glare if we try to go the wrong way.
First produced in Korea in 2013, One Day, Maybe was inspired by the suppressed 1980 Gwangju uprising in which 2,000 may have died, many as a result of detention and torture. The uprising is often seen as the turning point in South Korea’s struggle towards democracy. But what would some of the protestors think about what that democracy has achieved, particularly regarding South Korea’s role in the global marketplace? Did people die so you and I could have a smart fridge?
With dozens of cast members playing Kasang employees and police, the show conjures up the past and the dead who stare back accusingly from photographs. Director Tristan Sharps has always been a brilliant conjuror of absence.
The scale is always impressive, even if the content is sometimes thin. Some segments trail on too long and the show is so specifically about Korea that it risks losing universality. Although it does make you think what our ancestors might feel about how we use the freedoms they died defending.
The piece becomes increasingly emotionally pungent, and Sharps smartly uses juxtapositions: in one segment the muted home life of the past is in tension with the shiny emptiness of the present day. It is often in the silent moments that the show is at its most eloquent.
• At a Hull city centre venue until 1 October.
