What is the status of the stage play these days? Certainly not what it once was. Today the prime genres for drama are film and the TV series, historical or modern. The stage play, once the dominant dramatic form, has become the property of intellectuals and special-interest groups.
This is even more the case in South Korea than it is elsewhere. For long there was no Korean tradition of the indoor play, let alone a naturalistic one displaying contemporary life. Instead you had outdoor dance rituals, usually with masks, and puppet theater. The staged play came to Korea, as it had come to Japan, from Europe and the US, but social conditions, notably the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and subsequent censorship, led to a ban on anything that might purport to represent modern life as it really was. And then after 1945 Korea was consumed by such traumatic political developments — the Korean War, followed by a string of military dictatorships — that the situation remained similarly uncongenial for any kind of thoughtful or realistic artistic expression.
The smaller, more specialist audience for the stage play today has had its effects. The door is now wide open for experiment, for example. Whereas in the average TV soap you would never see, say, a character played by two actors on stage at the same time, in a contemporary stage play such a device wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. And just about anything goes, because the audience consists of theater people, enthusiasts for non-commercial art, and drama students and their teachers. The last thing they expect is a realistic story, let alone a love story featuring good-looking young actors and ending in a happy marriage or a tear-jerking farewell.
The stage play is also free to devote itself to examining serious social issues in a way the TV drama almost never does. The tradition of Ibsen, whose plays studied everything from the viability of the public water supply to syphilis, is alive and well on the contemporary stage — frequently a rather small stage located not too far from a university campus.
This is even more true in Korea, where the long-running popular drama playing to large audiences — the staple in London and New York 100 years ago, or even 50 — has never been known. Theatrically speaking, this is a society that has jumped from the archaic to the post-modern in one easy bound.
Take as an example one of the plays included here, Pak Kun-hyong’s In Praise of Youth. It features a boy who doesn’t want to go to school and a father who once gouged his wife’s eyes out, but the dominant tone is one of cartoon-like near-absurdity and unexpected humor. This would never be acceptable on TV because the taste of mass audiences is for truth to life as they see it and the satisfaction of their relatively uncomplicated needs and expectations. Arguably the most significant feature of In Praise of Youth — nothing if not an ironic title — is that its author is also a professor of playwriting.
Very important in the evaluation of modern (post-1960 in this book’s terms) South Korean theater plays in this volume is the independent and unrelated surge in international popularity of Korean musicals, soap operas and popular music. This phenomenon must have made those involved in these minority stage dramas feel increasingly marginalized. But of course, writing as they are for an essentially elite stratum in society, they may well feel even more superior as a result of their cult status.
It can’t go unnoticed either that these plays frequently express a solidarity with the mass of the people, even while that mass ignores their efforts and is instead glued to dramatic performances of a totally different kind.
So who will be remembered? It could be argued that the kind of experimentalists, writing for a small audience, will be the ones lauded as the real geniuses in future literary histories. My view is the reverse of this — that those responsible for popular entertainment will be seen as having commanded the scene and enjoyed the highest payments, while these others had to be content with the pickings, having the unenviable job of catering to a small minority of academics, weirdos and self-styled connoisseurs, and making ends meet financially by accepting whatever university positions might happen to become available.
That said, Modern Korean Drama: An Anthology is finely produced and meticulously edited. Richard Nichols is keenly aware of the problems surrounding his subject — mainly, that not enough translators of appropriate caliber are available in the field.
It’s clear that international successes from Korea such as the 1995 musical The Last Empress are of considerable significance. In other words, things don’t change very much, and it’s when quality and mass-appeal unite that history is truly made.
It’s the same elsewhere. In the UK, Tom Stoppard penned in The Invention of Love (1997), one of the finest plays of the era, or even any era, but immediately went on to write the script for the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998). I’m not claiming that the second is in any way the equal of the first, but merely that a writer who entirely loses contact with the tastes of the mass of educated people is effectively doomed. Maybe one day Stoppard will unify his talents and write a genuine masterpiece that is a major popular success as well. And let’s hope the same happens with one of South Korea’s currently marginalized — but highly talented — stage dramatists.
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