The ActorTects, a company platforming migrant and South Korean woman’s voices, presents Surviving Strangers at The Space.
A Western metropolis. Sometime in a near future. A pandemic erupts and a couple are stuck in lockdown together. At first, it’s all love, fun and games, but very soon the situation becomes unbearable. While the virus is spreading outside, something is happening inside…
Surviving Strangers is a contemporary dark dystopian comedy set in London, telling the story of a young couple (A & E – an English man and a South Korean woman) forced, due to a sudden unknown virus, to quarantine in a studio flat after a one-night stand. The play charts the course of a love affair confined to four walls, the daily struggles that constitute both the joy and hell, its misunderstandings and micro aggressions.
Raising questions about stereotypes, cultural difficulties and how East Asian women are viewed, through a white man’s gaze bound in K-pop clichés, Surviving Strangers uses the pandemic as a lens through which we examine an intercultural relationship and colonial attitudes.
Surviving Strangers began as a 40-minute scratch piece at the Camden Fringe Festival 2021, originally tilted ‘Pandemic of Love’. Overwhelmingly positive feedback from industry professionals encouraged us to develop a 60-minute play at the Space in November with a new creative team.
Surviving Strangers is at The Space 17th – 20th November 2022, with a livestream on the 19th.