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| "Kamome," a play by a team of Korean and Japanese thespians, takes Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" to 1930s Korea. / Courtesy of Doosan Art Center |
Team of Korean, Japanese thespians move ‘Seagull' to colonial-era Korea
By Kwon Mee-yoo
It's difficult to find a more transcendental work in theater than the Anton Chekhov play "The Seagull," a melancholy comedy about 19th-century Russian aristocrats that has been endlessly adapted for different times and space.
The much-done play is now being staged in Seoul by a team of Korean and Japanese thespians, who have shifted the setting from late 1800s Russia to 1930s Korea, a country then under the colonial rule of Japan and marching blindly toward wartime hardship.
Written by Korean playwright Sung Ki-woong of drama company 12th Tongue Theater and directed by Japan's Junnosuke Tada of Tokyo Deathlock, ''Kamome'' (which means seagull in Japanese) has been garnering generous reviews from its performance at Space 111 of the Doosan Art Center in central Seoul. The play, featuring eight Korean and four Japanese actors, was developed under the Doosan Art Lab project, backed by the conglomerate to support young artistic talent.
The play includes dialogue in Korean, Japanese and also Esperanto, the international auxiliary language developed by 19th-century linguist Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, sarcastically used here as an indicator of status. Naturally, Korean theatergoers are provided subtitles for the Japanese and Esperanto parts.
Set in a rural village in Korea, Kamome keeps The Seagull's plot structure intact, but makes an effort to re-imagine people of those times, their fear and uncertainty about the future balanced with an eagerness to embrace new cultures.
In Kamome, Chekhov's Boris Trigorin becomes Jiro Tsukaguchi, a Japanese writer in an affair with Korean actress Ryu Neung-hui, which is a version of Irina Arkadina.
Ryu Gi-hyeok, the Konstantin Treplyov character for Chekhov, son of the actress and an aspiring thespian, despises Tsukaguchi. It's no comfort to him that his lover Son Sun-im, a twist on Nina Zarechnaya, admires Tsukaguchi as much as his mother.
Tsukaguchi's character seems to double as a commentary on younger Koreans, torn between resisting new cultures and embracing them. Gi-hyeok's sense of defeat is convincingly expressed, making him a quintessential portrayal of a Korean intellectual in the ‘30s.
The long, rectangular stage looks like a landfill at first sight, decorated with broken furniture, old paper and rubbish. The audience is positioned at each side of the stage and the actors enter from the upper left side of the stage and exit to the lower right side, as if to dramatize the flow of time.
While the characters are stuck in the ‘30s, the play's music is 21st century. Korean and Japanese pop songs are in heavy rotation. The affair between Tsukaguchi and Neung-hui is played to the background of the soundtrack from "Winter Sonata,'' the tear-jerking television drama that ignited the Korean culture boom in Japan a decade ago.
"Kamome'' runs through Oct. 26. Tickets cost 30,000 won. For more information, visit www.doosanartcenter.com or call (02) 708-5001.
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