On Lee Young-Seok’s Production of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air

Abstract

Lee Yeong-Seok has adapted George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air for two actors. The historical, cultural and generic difference is overcome by the invention of an original acting and staging style, a ‘tellacting’, which combines acting and storytelling.

Lee Young-Seok belongs to a generation of directors trained in the early 2000s at the Korean National University of the Arts. I have followed his work since 2002: always the same rigor, a taste for the difficult, an originality in simplicity.

I was delighted to observe how he set about adapting Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, written at a time, in a place, and a style very far from contemporary Korean reality.

In this textual and physical adaptation, the two actor-narrators engage two identical English petit-bourgeois figures in dialogue. The divided anti-hero tells his life story, and lays out his simplistic and naïve philosophy. Orwell’s writing, magnified by the simple-minded pair, intimates the historical subtext and the resigned and cynical attitude of a whole generation: Orwell’s generation, but also our own, in Europe or in Korea.