Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
Veteran actress shows her range in 'Fairy'
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Kim Song-nyo shines in the monodrama, “A Fairy in the Wall.” / Courtesy of Myeongdong Theater
By Kwon Mee-yoo
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Kim Song-nyo is one of the greatest actors of her generation and certainly among the most versatile. Making her first stage appearance at the age of five, she has become perhaps the country’s most important performer in traditional plays such as “madangnori” (outdoor play, song and dance) and “changgeuk” (pre-modern form of opera) and an influential figure in modern drama.
The 63-year-old’s talents were on full display in the one-woman show, “A Fairy in the Wall,” which she will perform through Sunday at Myeongdong Theater in Seoul.
Kim says the new play felt like a summary of her four-decade career. To audiences, it is an opportunity to watch her unique stage talents.
The play requires her to portray 32 different characters in 135 minutes, beginning with a five-year-old girl who chats about her belief in fairies to her frustrated mother and eventually a man who spends 40 years living in a wall to protect his family from outsiders.
The story about the man is based loosely on a true event reported during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and it was Japanese playwright Fukuda Yoshiyuki who first converted the story into the script.
Fukuda’s script was adapted into Korean by Bae Sam-sik, who set the story in the Korean War (1950-53) and added the man’s wife and daughter as characters. Amid the ideological witch hunt that coincided with the war, the man goes behind the walls of his home to hide from his pursuers. Her daughter grows up thinking there is a fairy inside those walls.
Son Jin-chaek, veteran director and Kim’s husband, has been directing Fairy since it premiered in 2005. It’s easy to understand why Son thought the piece effectively plays to the skills of his partner.
The production moves swiftly between comedy and drama and Kim handles the transitions seamlessly and deftly builds up emotional tension as the story progresses. Kim also gets to show her range as a theatrical singer, delivering folksongs with nuance and intense protest songs with authority.
There are a few scenes in the play that a lesser actor might have overdone, such as when the man discovers the flowers his daughter gathered for him in a weak ray of sunlight and when he watches her wedding through a hole in the wall. But Kim shows restraint and her understated delivery gives the play a complexity that isn’t provided by the script.
Absorbing a curtain call after one of the performances, Kim, expressed her gratitude to the audiences.
“A play gets to live only while it communicates with the audience. I wouldn’t have been returning to this role for the past 10 years if it weren’t for you,” she said.
The play runs through Sunday. Tickets cost from 20,000 to 50,000 won. For more information, visit www.mdtheater.or.kr or call 1644-2003.