Jaha Koo’s gentle, curious piece didn’t particularly move or affect me while I was watching it. Yet the following morning I found myself still thinking about its snail, singing gummy bear and extraordinary electronic eel. Perhaps this is a show whose flavours develop over time.
The Studio is a comfortable, well-raked room with a generous stage. Upon it sits an almost pagoda-like structure, its sloping translucent surfaces becoming screens onto which images of a Korean metropolis are projected. Percussive music accompanies them and a brightly illuminated orange crown completes a rather striking opening image.
Koo arrives and quite literally peels this theatrical exterior away. Underneath is something altogether more prosaic: the stainless-steel counter of a Korean street-food stall (pojangmacha) and several stools. Two audience members are invited forward, and Koo begins cooking for them.
Kimchi pancakes, cold seaweed soup and dessert accompany stories of Korea, migration and food. Additional screens turn towards us while images of Korean life provide a constantly changing visual backdrop.
Initially, it’s charming. Koo tells us about finding a snail and attempting to nurture it in his apartment. After exploring its new environment for a couple of weeks, it gradually curls into a ball in the soil and retreats into hibernation until Koo eventually has to return it to nature. The snail even sings to us through some wonderfully playful video manipulation.
Cute? Certainly. But the allegory of displacement becomes increasingly difficult to miss.
Koo left South Korea for Europe, eventually settling in Germany. He recalls his grandmother packing him off with an extraordinary ten kilos of kimchi, with predictably unfortunate consequences when fermentation, pressure and heat become involved.
Then another creature enters his story: a Haribo gummy bear.
The contrast is delicious. Against kimchi, seaweed, herbs and the flavours of Koo’s Korean upbringing sits this brightly coloured, manufactured European sweet. Haribo becomes something Koo consumes almost compulsively while travelling by train through Germany, and perhaps something of an acquired Western identity.
Koo also introduces considerably darker experiences of racism and alienation, but even these are delivered with remarkable restraint. Nothing here is shouted.
Finally comes my favourite technological curiosity, an illuminated electronic eel which navigates its way around the stage with an intelligence that made me immediately want one. Its extraordinary migrations across thousands of miles become another metaphor for human movement, transplantation and the physical and psychological consequences of living between cultures.
There is a lot going on in Haribo Kimchi. Perhaps, occasionally, too quietly.
Its combination of cooking, projection, music and storytelling successfully introduces us to the otherness of a culture far removed from our own. Yet Koo’s understated delivery means some potentially powerful ideas about racism, migration, cultural identity and belonging don’t necessarily hit with the force they might.
But perhaps that’s the point.
I left thinking I’d watched an agreeable, beautifully presented introduction to Korean culture through food and storytelling. A day later, I’m considerably less certain. That snail, gummy bear and travelling eel have stubbornly refused to leave my mind.
Haribo Kimchi is oddly subliminal in it’s messaging and like the kimchi itself, it requires time to ferment.
Playing until Monday 24th August, https://boxoffice.eif.co.uk/edinburghinternationalfestival/website/eventlist.aspx
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 20th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 10mins