A Few Contemporary French and Korean Playwrights: A Comparison

Abstract

Because of an increasingly global culture, contemporary playwrights tend to use similar techniques and comparable topics. In a systematic comparison of recent plays the author shows that despite the convergence, there was a great quality and diversity in their dramatic writings. National frameworks are exploding before the eyes of postmodern and postdramatic spectators.

Often, well-meaning friends would ask me to compare Korean and European theater. My response was always evasive: how can one compare the incomparable?

One day, the artistic director of the Namsan Drama Center, a space for the creation of new writing like our Royal Court or our Théâtre Ouvert, invited me to a conference on contemporary French dramatic writing—something that already felt distant! I would have preferred to give my, very fresh, impressions of all the Korean plays I had seen on Namsan’s stage. “It would be better to compare Korean and French plays in order to help the audience orient itself,” I dared to suggest.

And, in fact, often having access to the English translations of these new plays, I could follow what was happening, and did not feel too disoriented in terms of themes, narrative structure, dramatic techniques, not to mention the convinced and emphatic acting style. As if by magic, this convergence of the two theaters was not the obvious result of globalization’s sanding down of any nationally specific bumps, rather, it was evidence of a humanistic cosmopolitanism. It showed a will, more or less conscious, to dodge or to circumvent the postdramatic (in the case of Korea) or to move beyond it (for the French playwrights), a will either to stick or return to the values of the dramatic.

After the discussion that followed my lecture, I was fortunate enough to meet some of the Korean playwrights I had used as examples. Everything I said to them that evening I could have said to their French counterparts, had there been the opportunity to meet them with the same ease and amenity.