Han Kang's 'We Do Not Part' finds intimate voice on Seoul stage

On a stage stripped of almost everything but white, actors Isabelle Huppert and Lee Hye-young summoned a snowbound island. There were no trees, no hospital bed and no visible parrot to rescue. Yet as the French and Korean actors read from Han Kang’s novel, their voices and languages supplied the scenery: severed fingers ache and snow gathering around an unseen house.

“Oiseau,” a bilingual reading play drawn from the Nobel laureaute's “We Do Not Part,” made its Korean premiere at Sogang University’s Mary Hall on Saturday — exactly two years after Han won the Nobel Prize in literature, a date Korean literature fans affectionately call “Han Kang Day.”

Presented through Sunday as part of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF), the production brought July’s Avignon Festival premiere from the roughly 2,000-seat outdoor Cour d’honneur at the Palace of the Popes into a 500-seat indoor theater.

The smaller space sharpened its defining quality: intimacy.

Dressed in white, Huppert and Lee stood amid white fabric in front of reading stands. Huppert voiced Kyung-ha in French while Lee read In-seon in Korean. Korean and English subtitles accompanied the French passages, while French and English translations appeared during Lee’s reading.

The story begins with In-seon hospitalized after losing two fingers in a woodworking accident. She asks her friend Kyung-ha to travel to Jeju Island and feed her parrot before it dies. Kyung-ha’s journey through a blizzard gradually opens another landscape: the buried violence of the Jeju April 3 tragedy.

The contrast between Huppert’s French and Lee’s Korean also seemed to give audible form to the cultural distance between Kyung-ha, a mainland Korean, and In-seon, a Jeju native, without diminishing the intimacy of their friendship.

Without reenacting the violence, the production made accounts of agonizing medical treatment and a mother searching among bodies for relatives demanded that viewers imagine what the stage withheld.

At the post-performance press conference, Huppert said moving indoors has changed the actors’ relationship with each other and their audience.

“In Avignon, natural elements were with us, which was unique. But here, we had something else: more proximity and intimacy with the audiences,” she said.

Han’s writing, she added, retained its power regardless of location, reaching spectators with “a different kind of intensity.”

Lee likewise felt a shift before an audience listening in her mother tongue.

“The audience completes theater,” she said. “I could feel audiences listening in their native language concentrating more closely on the dialogue.”

Director Julie Deliquet said she wanted to foreground the women’s friendship and vulnerability before approaching the massacre. The sparse design followed that restraint, allowing drifting snow and voices to carry the emotional weight.

Having also staged work by another Nobel laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, Deliquet said she had explored “how literature and art can approach questions that history has been unable, or has not dared, to address.”

“Through literature, we discover tragedies that history has failed to address and, through voices of those who experienced them, confront human vulnerability and humanity firsthand,” she said. “That is both a privilege and a joy of being an artist.”

The ending also changed. In Avignon, Han made an unexpected appearance to read the final passage. In Seoul, 15-year-old teenage girl Hwang Ju-hyun took her place.

Deliquet said Lee had told her it took decades for the Jeju tragedy to enter textbooks, prompting her to entrust the passage to someone from the generation inheriting that history.

“In France and Europe, too, there are histories that only became known after several generations,” she said.

Huppert drew a parallel with uncovering events long buried in silence during World War II.

“The history that Han Kang addresses is the history of us all and has a universal value,” she said.

For Deliquet, the exchange extends beyond borders and beyond the living.

“Literature and art continue a dialogue between those who are alive and the souls who have departed,” she said.