Kim's Convenience: As Brilliant On Stage As It Is On Netflix

There's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which the Seinfeld writer Larry David has a crack at playing his own creation, George Constanza. It's an unmitigated disaster.

But as Ins Choi — the man behind the wildly successfully Netflix comedy Kim's Convenience — steps into the role of the incorrigible Korean grocery store owner Appa in the stage production of the same show, he is every bit as good as Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, the man who plays him on screen. That is no mean feat.

While most will know Kim's Convenience as a TV show — one that's rightly been praised for thrusting 3D Asian characters into the limelight, and being downright hilarious too — it has in fact been on stage on and off for almost two decades now. Riverside Studios becomes a small Toronto grocery store; the set of colourful junk food packaging and frosted-up fridges making a natural setting for various shoplifters, developers and policeman (all played with aplomb by Miles Mitchell) to waft in and out.

The play — a nifty 80 minutes long — packs in themes of immigration, gentrification, forgiveness, even death ("This store is my story," says Appa from time to time) — all the more impressive given that above anything else, Kim's Convenience makes you laugh out loud again and again.

While Kim's Convenience has a comfort blanket quality, it's easy to forget how near the knuckle some of the gags are. Appa's crackpot system for detecting shoplifters (one lesbian=shoplifter, but two lesbians cancel each other out) only passes muster because of the endearing bloodymindedness of the character, and the soft, thoughtful way in which Choi shows his working to long-suffering daughter Janet (another star turn, this one from Jennifer Kim). Appa's pronunciation of 'peanuts', meanwhile, will have you spitting your wine across the auditorium.

There's the occasional bit of acclimatising to do. Take the earnest tete-a-tete between Umma (played by Namju Go) and her wayward son, Jung (Edward Wu) — which improbably has them sing to one other (this is not a musical adaptation by the way). There's also a moment where Appa drops the f-bomb and hurls a book across the stage, which feels tantamount to Eric Morecambe calling Ernie Wise a c**t. Then again, it's only because audiences have grown so attached to the characters in Kim's Convenience that they might feel strongly about something like this. Ins Choi can be incredibly proud of that.

Kims' Convenience, Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, until 26 October 2024