Koreaboo review – Michelle Lim Davidson’s debut play is a tender tribute to fan culture
Brisbane festival
Inspired by her own experiences, the actor-playwright covers emotionally sticky terrain in a fraught mother-daughter reunion across cultural divides
There’s a particular blend of wariness, prickliness and disapproval that is sometimes transmitted from grandmothers to granddaughters and mothers to daughters that, if you experienced it, you know its coldness. Even if you grow up in the same house, generational and cultural divides can make these women feel like strangers – let alone if you meet them for the first time later in life.
This very recognisable, emotionally sticky terrain is mapped in actor Michelle Lim Davidson’s (The Newsreader) debut play, Koreaboo, taking a victory lap of Brisbane and Melbourne this month after a sellout premiere season at Sydney’s Griffin theatre in 2025, directed by Jessica Arthur.
Michelle Lim Davidson: ‘I felt like I was an alien. I couldn’t recognise my own reflection’
Read more
The play, as its title suggests, has a culturally specific context too. A “Koreaboo” is someone – typically not Korean – who is obsessed with Korean pop culture. In this story, inspired by Lim Davidson’s own experiences, the Koreaboo is Hannah (played by Lim Davidson): a young Australian woman who has arrived at a tiny one-woman convenience store in Seoul looking to spend time with its proprietress, her birth mother. Hannah was born in Korea and put up for adoption as a baby, then adopted and raised in regional New South Wales. She’s only recently reconnected with her Umma, and arrives in her shop very much a stranger in a strange land.
In the first of many communication mix-ups between the two, Umma (Heather Jeong, a TV chef making her acting debut) thinks Hannah is due in a week and coming for a short vacation; Hannah’s emotional hunger is evident when she clarifies that she’s there for the whole summer: “I want to be with you.” Umma’s emotional discomfort is equally evident when she says, brusquely: “Go to Busan. Eat some fish.”
The stakes are especially high for Hannah: she’s not only seeking maternal validation, but confirmation of identity. She feels too Korean to be properly Australian and too Australian to be properly Korean. Umma taps into her worst fears of not only parental but also cultural rejection, treating Hannah like a tourist; criticising her language skills, her skin. “[You are] not Korean,” she says bluntly.
The play unfolds, largely inside the convenience store (an intimate, visually rich set designed by Mel Page, stacked with mouth-watering snacks), as a cat and mouse game – if the cat were a kitten, and the mouse knew Hapkido. Hannah seeks validation and intimacy, Umma blocks and deflects. But a common language emerges: K-pop. Umma loves K-pop even more than Hannah does – and has better dance moves. As fellow soldiers in the BTS Army, they find the first glimmers of a solidarity slowly kindle to something more.
There’s a specificity to Lim Davidson’s characters, and the actors’ performances, that is rich and beguiling, and saves the material from feeling cliched. Hannah is a former eisteddfod tap dance champion (like Lim). Umma is obsessed with garden gnomes, her “friends”. It speaks to her loneliness and her sense of imagination. When Hannah asks her about her attachment to this quintessentially white cultural artefact, Umma explains that they are manufactured in Korea – so they’re Korean. Both women’s faces fall as the implications of the comment land.
Performance is a running theme: performance of identity, of intimacy, of culture. In the opening scene, Umma touchingly tells Hannah to re-enter the shop as a stranger so they can re-do their botched reunion. Later, Hannah enters a TV talent show and transforms herself with cute-core outfits and K-pop affectations per Umma’s instructions – to be more “Korean”.
skip past newsletter promotion
This cultural appropriation cuts both ways: Umma, we find out, is a Carrie-boo – a Sex and the City fan who can quote the dialogue and whose secret remedy for the blues is closing the shop and pretending she’s in “the Big Apple”, hailing taxis and drinking cosmopolitans. Koreaboo is a tender tribute to the ways in which fan culture fosters kinship across all kinds of seemingly unbreachable divides.
It’s significant that we only find out Umma’s name in the final stretch of the play. We also find out she – Soon Hee – dreamed as a young girl of being a singer. It underscores Lim Davidson’s perhaps hard-won emotional wisdom about these kinds of relationships between mothers and daughters: that you can’t re-do or manufacture a parent-child connection later in life; that you have to meet each other as fully formed individuals and aim first for friendship.
If Koreaboo is at risk of being too sweet, too cute, it is saved by this undercurrent of emotional complexity. The play is less interested in the performance or the facade than what happens once it crumbles; what tendrils grow in the ruins.
-
Koreaboo is on at La Boite theatre as part of Brisbane festival until 19 September, then at Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre from 24 September to 10 October
Explore more on these topicsShare
Reuse this content
