Among recent documentary theatre productions in South Korea, Hamlet for Only Nine Days (2013) has been both one of the most aesthetically experimental and one of the most directly political. Directed by Hoon Ko and Eun-young Kwon from theatre company Vibrating Jelly, the play was performed by former employees of the CortCortec guitar factory (In-geun Lee, Kyeong-bong Kim, Seok-cheon Jang and Jae-chun Lim) and also by civic activist Mi-kyung Choi. In this play, laid-off workers appeared onstage and performed Shakespeare's Hamlet, accompanied by a documentary film showing their struggles as well as rehearsals for the play. The title Hamlet for Only Nine Days was chosen because of the duration of the run, which – unusually – was sold out and received much attention from critics. How did workers’ theatre, which is often considered outdated and unsuited for the postmodern era of hybridity and diversity because of its crude, ideology-oriented slogans, draw renewed attention in South Korea in 2013? This study will analyse the characteristics of Hamlet for Only Nine Days as documentary theatre and review its political significance. I will consider how the process of making new theatre in a documentary form, which involved workers who were acting for the first time, staged a social critique of the workers’ reality in South Korea. In order to do so, I will focus on the ways Hamlet for Only Nine Days mixed various forms of real-world representation with theatrical fiction.
A theatre of the real
The decision to create the performance was made by Lee, Kim, Jang and Lim to spread awareness of what they saw as the injustice of CortCortec's lay-off of workers in 2007. Consisting of two South Korean factories – Cort in Incheon and Cortec in Daejeon – the CortCortec company was a maker of Korean electric guitars which, in 2007, commanded 30 per cent of the world's electric guitar market. It produced global electric guitar brands such as Fender and Ibanez. In 2005, however, CortCortec began relocating factories in Korea to Indonesia and China to take advantage of cheaper labour costs. This reduced the production volume of Korean factories, and on 9 April 2007 CortCortec closed its doors in South Korea. On 30 August 2007, the owner laid off the workers, citing ‘an impending business crisis’ as the main reason. In October 2008, the Seoul Administrative Court ruled,
The layoff was legal since the impending management crisis was acknowledged. The reasons for the ruling are as follows: First, the management performance of CortCortec had been worsening from 2003, resulting in business losses. Second, net profit from 2003 had also been declining. As a result, the company posted an operating loss of 1.78 billion won and a net loss of 850 million won in 2006.Footnote 1
This ruling was reversed at a second trial by the Seoul High Court in November 2009, which asserted ‘the company's net loss was posted for the first time in 2006 since the year 2000, and its sales figures were below average for the first time in 2006 . . . This was therefore a case of unfair dismissal’.Footnote 2 In February 2012, the Supreme Court determined that the layoff by the Cort factory in Incheon was indeed wrongful, but that further information was required before a judgment could be made on the legality of the Cortec factory lay-off in Daejeon.Footnote 3 The financial audit by an accounting firm appointed by the Supreme Court dated 16 August 2013 pointed out that ‘CortCortec did not seem to experience sufficient financial difficulty as to justify the layoff and there were no financial factors leading to a crisis situation due to the business losses at the Cortec factory’.Footnote 4 However, in a fourth verdict announced on 10 January 2014, the workers lost the case when the Supreme Court ruled that the layoff ‘must be respected because the impending management crisis is acknowledged’.Footnote 5 Against this backdrop, a coalition of labour-law organizations stated,
It is unfair to acknowledge the impending management crisis of the company due merely to worsened profitability at the Cortec factory. It is unreasonable to exclude the financial audit by an accounting firm appointed by the Supreme Court, too . . . This ruling could not have been worse. It shows that any employer can dismiss their employees at will.Footnote 6
For six years, the laid-off workers found solidarity by camping in tents outside the closed factory, and made strenuous efforts to publicize the unfairness of the lay-off. Their decision to take part in Hamlet for Only Nine Days can be seen as part of such efforts.Footnote 7 Mi-kyung Choi joined the production to help the workers in their battle.Footnote 8 Vibrating Jelly directors Ko and Kwon also decided to contribute to the creation of the performance as an expression of solidarity. They wanted the workers to play Hamlet while also revealing their own personalities as actual workers. They strove to depict onstage a vivid image of CortCortec workers experiencing theatre and acting for the first time. Combining a documentary film of the workers’ life with the fictional Hamlet acted by the workers onstage, the directors aimed to explore the possibilities of political aesthetics.Footnote 9
Most of the audience in the first show, which was performed on 7 October 2013 at the small theatre Hyehwa No 1, consisted of workers and supporting organizations. The play subsequently attracted attention via word-of-mouth publicity, and was restaged for the general public over nine days in December 2013.
With limited previous theatre exposure, the CortCortec workers were motivated to do the play in an act of protest against their treatment by their employer. While Hamlet for Only Nine Days adopted excerpts from Shakepeare's text, the play was conceived not only as a fictional artefact but also as representation of the realities they were facing, including enduring the pains of real life.Footnote 10 As theatre critic So-yeon Kim put it, ‘Hamlet for Only Nine Days creates a dramatic tension in these two layers of conflicts developed in parallel . . . Hamlet for Only Nine Days is Hamlet, as well as a record of CortCortec workers’ struggles, as well as a play of resistance and rage’.Footnote 11
A description of the structure of the production will give an indication of how this happened. The fictional story of Hamlet is edited into a total of nine acts in Hamlet for Only Nine Days. Between the excerpted scenes from Hamlet, the workers’ documentary videos were projected onto a screen. Staging was minimal, featuring only four lightweight doors erected at the back of the stage like a folding screen. The actors entered and exited through these doors.
In Act I, Hamlet encounters a ghost.Footnote 12 A broken guitar hangs in the air on the right side of the stage, alone and bathed in light. This broken guitar, made by CortCortec, serves as the spirit of Hamlet's dead father. The spirit's voice is a voice-over by worker Kyeong-bong Kim. The spirit's dialogue – ‘That snake which poisoned me is wearing my crown . . . How resentful, oh how resentful!’ – is paralleled by a video clip showing a darkened CortCortec factory and its machines.Footnote 13 The implication is that the real-life anger of the laid-off workers, represented by the broken guitar and the panorama of the closed factory, cannot be distinguished from the anguish of the spirit that had died unfairly in the play.
In Act II, Claudius succeeds to the throne and marries his elder brother's widow, Gertrude, in front of his courtiers. Act II is followed by a video clip recounting the history of CortCortec from its foundation, through graphs that detail the financial situation and industrial incidents at the company at the point of lay-off, and a PowerPoint presentation on CortCortec's project to relocate the factory to Indonesia. Here, the actors present themselves as workers. The video shows that the company had a starting capital of two million KRW in 1961, and In-geun Lee, playing Claudius, explains to the audience, ‘The father of the present owner started the business like that’. Lee and Mi-kyung Choi, playing Gertrude, stare at the video and chat about it. When the screen shows Lee standing on the roof of the factory and fighting against the company in 2008, Choi asks, ‘Your Highness, is that you up there?’ To this, Lee replies, ‘Yes, it is me. I was scared to death’, making the audience laugh. In these scenes, the dichotomy of the stage as a site of fiction and screen as representing actuality caves in. It is difficult to distinguish between Lee and Claudius; nor is it easy to ascertain whether it is Choi or Gertrude who asks the question. The wedding hall of Claudius and Gertrude is transformed into a place where CortCortec's poor employer–worker relations can be disclosed.
In Act III, Polonius reports to the king and queen that Hamlet has gone mad because of his love for Ophelia. However, such madness does not apply only to the state of the characters in the play. Act III is followed by a video clip of interviews with workers who also act onstage. The video clip features Jang confessing, ‘It is funny that people like us are doing a play. My family even says, “It is crazy that you dare do such a performance without worrying about the struggle against the employer”’; and Kim stating, ‘Even my family says it is mad that a handful of workers fight against a huge company’. In the play, Hamlet's bizarre and exceptional attributes are what make others think he is mad. The video draws a parallel between Hamlet and the workers, who in reality have been regarded as insane, reckless and thoughtless.
In Act IV, Hamlet decides that Ophelia is acting on the instructions of Polonius and the king, and thus treats her coldly. In the scene of the conversation between Ophelia and Hamlet, the stage and video action are interwoven. The language of Shakespeare's play, which is filled with imagery and abuse, oratory and metaphor, and rhythm and prose, seemed to be an obstacle to workers who were not familiar with the cultural environment of text-based drama. In particular, Jae-chun Lim, who played Ophelia, had a challenging time in the read-through. For Lim, who in five decades had never acted in a play, it must have been difficult to play Ophelia. He constantly complained of the difficulty of memorizing lines. Directors offered instead to show his insurmountable impediment to the audience. Lim agreed to this offer. Consequently, between the onstage scenes of Act IV, the production presents video clips of Lim and Seok-cheon Jang (as Hamlet) rehearsing and reading out their lines. The cross-cutting of the stage and video clips was repeated multiple times. The result is a conversation between Hamlet and the rehearsal videos.
A scene from Hamlet for Only Nine Days in which staging was minimal, featuring only four lightweight doors erected at the back of the stage like a folding screen. Photograph courtesy of Taeg-yong Jeong, 2013.
For example, between Acts IV and V, Ophelia bursts into tears when Hamlet grills her; at the same time, a video clip is screened of workers travelling to Japan and the US to let the world know of their struggle. The result is an intersection between Hamlet's anger over Claudius and workers’ resistance to their employer. Act V stages Hamlet watching for a chance to take revenge on Claudius, who temporarily shows repentance. After that, Claudius decides to send Hamlet to England. Between Claudius's repentance and decision scenes in Act V is a video clip showing workers protesting against a verdict by the Supreme Court in 2012.
As a result, the cold-heartedness of Claudius trying to banish Hamlet overlaps with the Supreme Court decision of 2012, which annulled the earlier verdict that the lay-off by the Cortec factory in Daejeon was wrongful.Footnote 14 Ophelia, who bursts into tears, and Hamlet, who watches for an opportunity to avenge himself upon Claudius, represent the different selves of the workers determined to control their pent-up anger and fight against CortCortec and the judicial system.
In Act VI, Hamlet is quarreling with his mother Gertrude when he mistakes Polonius, hidden behind the curtains, for the king and stabs him. The broken guitar re-emerges to act as the spirit of Hamlet's father, accompanied by Kim's voice-over. As in Act I, the hanging guitar urges Hamlet to take revenge: ‘Do not forget that I have come here to strengthen your weakened determination’ (Hamlet III, iv: 110–11).Footnote 15 Jang, announcing to Gertrude that Hamlet's father is there even though she cannot see the spirit, plays a Hamlet whose personality is being slowly destroyed. Act VI is followed by a clip showing the demolition of the CortCortec factory in 2013 and then the 2012 sit-in demonstration protesting against the Supreme Court verdict, moving back to the past in flashbacks to the scene of 2007, where workers are shown looking around the factory before leaving for the last time. Thus Hamlet's delusional breakdown and Gertrude's mournful wails combine with footage of the CortCortec factory being torn down by cranes and excavators in 2013 to amplify the emotion of despair.
Act VII consists of a video clip that shows Claudius questioning the whereabouts of the dead Polonius and Hamlet responding sarcastically. Since the workers found the rhetoric and metaphors in the conversation between Claudius and Hamlet difficult, after consultation the directors tried to lighten their burden by featuring a juxtaposition of lines and images on film, instead of having it acted out onstage:
HAMLET: (Over footage of the Cort factory in Incheon) Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
HAMLET: (Over footage shot in front of CortCortec headquarters in Seoul) Your worm is your only emperor for diet: We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.
CLAUDIUS: (Over footage of the workers’ band performance in front of Hongik University, Seoul) Where is Polonius? (IV, iii: 17–23)Footnote 16
The film montage set in the factory, in front of the CortCortec headquarters, or at the venue for the workers’ band performance, related the lines from Hamlet to the actual struggles of the workers. At the same time, the montage had a playful function.
Act VIII stages Ophelia's funeral, and Act IX the fight between Laertes and Hamlet. In Act IX, as in the original, Hamlet dies from Laertes's poison-tipped sword. During this scene a video clip shows the workers determined to fight in front of the Supreme Court. In the clip, Jang said, ‘We have nothing to lose. We will throw ourselves into our struggle and fight against our employer. What has happened to this country?’ Jang's protest in the video clip implies to the audience that his role of Hamlet, who says to his friend Horatio as he dies from the devious political scheme, ‘You should live and let many others know of this incident’, is also applicable to the situation of the workers (V, ii: 350–4).Footnote 17 At the same time, this last scene features a song, ‘What Shall I Do?’, expressing a powerful sense of futility after being dumped by a lover, sung by Colban, a band created by the workers. Overwhelmed by loss, this song serves as a funeral ode for Hamlet in the play as well as an elegy for the workers who lost their jobs.
Hamlet for Only Nine Days created a conversation between the play and the video clips, between a fictional narrative and actual events, and between Hamlet’s tragic beauty and the workers’ anger. The video clips of the workers’ rehearsals for the play and their struggles were not only used to provide evidence of the facts, but also cross-cut with Hamlet, drawing similarities between the two. This contributed effectively to explaining the unfairness of the lay-off that the workers went through. At the same time, the workers experienced the delight of constituting and reconstituting a new world, and playing with the tension between fact and fiction. The outraged gestures of the workers toward the lay-off in reality were dissolved in Hamlet's crazed gestures, creating a whole new physical experience with the sensations of seeing, talking and acting differently. That is why Hamlet for Only Nine Days became another reality for the workers, a ‘theatre of the real’.Footnote 18
Doubleness and the dramatic structure of the production
Hamlet for Only Nine Days conveyed the beauty of ‘self-restraint’ and ‘self-control’, as the workers did not directly express their anger due to the lay-off. South Korean sociologist Jin-kyung Lee gave the following review:
Contrary to the helplessness that may be revealed from professional actors’ mature acting combined with melodrama, the simplicity rather creates a moderate and fresh sensation. I prefer it this way. What's most important in their version of Hamlet is how Hamlet meets with the laid-off workers of CortCortec.Footnote 19
Lee relates the acting process of Hamlet for Only Nine Days to how the actors appeared onstage. Did they appear as workers? Or as characters from Hamlet? The directors and actors reportedly faced conflicts on this issue when rehearsing and producing the play. The directors wanted to design a documentary theatre production that created a synergistic effect by combining the images of actual workers with the images of characters from Hamlet. The actors did not have to act out Hamlet very well, but the directors nonetheless created a rehearsal environment where the actors could become lost in their roles. The directors said they wanted to show honestly that CortCortec workers were experiencing theatre and acting for the first time in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Director Hoon Ko said, ‘The purpose of the theatre was that in striving to act faithfully according to Hamlet, the workers’ authentic selves would be revealed’.Footnote 20 For example, in Act IV of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet decides that Ophelia has been instructed by Polonius and the king, and treats her coldly. Seok-cheon Jang, who played Hamlet, said that he could not understand why Hamlet was so furious at Ophelia. In coaching Jang's acting, director Hoon Ko suggested that Jang recall an ‘emotional memory’ in which he felt furious owing to a sense of betrayal in real life.Footnote 21 In Act VI, where Hamlet's mother Gertrude bursts into tears while quarrelling with Hamlet, civic activist Mi-kyung Choi, who played Gertrude, also had difficulty empathizing with the queen's grief. Director Ko encouraged her to find a memory similar to the queen's guilt toward Hamlet in her life.Footnote 22 All the other actors also confessed in interview that the directors demanded a high level of acting. In fact, the CortCortec struggle was much more important to the workers. They joined the play to publicize the sit-in, and as such the directors’ demands for more elaborate movements, more emotions and more controlled breathing annoyed them. As a result, the directors’ suggestion for the actors to adopt Stanislavsky's ‘as-if’ acting was recognized as unnatural for actual workers and civic activists.Footnote 23
This process might seem like the directors were trying to control the actors or impose their artistic goals on the workers. In turn, the rehearsal process might raise complex ethical considerations regarding the workers’ aesthetic ownership of their performances. However, I do not think so. The workers also benefited from their roles in the production. The workers were exhausted from six years of struggle, and had lost hope. In order to enliven them, the directors helped the workers feel the joy of play in the course of rehearsal. The directors wanted the workers to obtain comfort and hope by being engrossed in art and enjoying the processes of the play. Of course, the directors were aware that this play could not be the sole means to enliven the workers, because the workers would not be reinstated in their old positions while playing Hamlet.Footnote 24 I might say that this was how the directors created solidarity with the workers. In fact, rehearsals were carried out according to the protest schedules of the workers. Those rehearsals even involved directors comforting the tired workers. Before thinking about the production, the directors had to observe the workers’ lives, bodies, styles of speech and journeys in life. After the observation, the directors had to propose Hamlet’s gestures and lines in a manner that was suitable for the workers’ gestures and styles of speech.Footnote 25 The selection of Hamlet as the text was not a result of coercion but of a proposal. Director Eun-young Kwon said, ‘Director Hoon Ko and I thought the most popular play that the workers already knew was Hamlet; then, we asked if they knew Hamlet. They said they had heard of it. So, we suggested performing Hamlet, and then they kindly accepted it’.Footnote 26 However, the directors’ guidance did not sufficiently motivate the workers to engage fully with the artistic possibilities of theatre. Thus the actors found the directors’ coaching to be unnatural.
This conflict was resolved when the actors involved themselves creatively in their own situation. In contrast to the directors, the actors did not regard the acting of the Hamlet roles as fictional and imaginative; their acting was rooted in their immediate experiences. In-geun Lee, who played Claudius, explained that he could empathize with the plot of Hamlet because of similarities in the conditions of the laid-off workers of CortCortec. Lee felt that the scene where Claudius attempts to kill his own nephew to fulfil his desire was similar to the situation in which the CortCortec CEO Young-ho Park was abandoning the employees – his so-called family.Footnote 27 Kyeong-bong Kim, who played Polonius, said he reflected on the middle managers of CortCortec from Polonius's confusion over which side to take – the king's or the prince's. To Kim, the memory of being betrayed by the middle managers, who unconditionally took the owner's side, compelled him to think over the role of Polonius, who ends up taking the king's side.Footnote 28 Jae-chun Lim, who played Ophelia, said that this role reminded him of the subcontractors victimized by CortCortec.Footnote 29 Mi-kyung Choi, who played Gertrude, also analysed Gertrude's guilt over marrying Hamlet's uncle shortly after Hamlet's father's death according to her own situation. She confessed that her tears of guilt in Act 6 came from her feelings of guilt over being incapable of helping the CortCortec workers as a civic activist. Gertrude's tears were replaced by Mi-kyung Choi's tears, she said.Footnote 30
Seok-cheon Jang, playing Hamlet, is looking at a ghost, here a CortCortec guitar, in Act VI. Photograph courtesy of Taeg-yong Jeong, 2013.
Seok-cheon Jang suddenly disappeared after the performance, discontinuing the struggle altogether. According to Choi, Jang agonized over whether to continue the fight, or to get a job and make a living, seemingly in answer to Hamlet's famous soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (III, i: 56). Choi said this actual inner conflict may have motivated Jang's performance as Hamlet.Footnote 31
Can we usefully describe the people onstage as real people – that is, as real workers and real civic activists? Choi explained that the actors could also draw empathy from the audience because their acting was imperfect. The workers did not directly express their pain, anguish and sense of loss, but indirectly expressed themselves by acting the roles of Hamlet, which appeared to strike a powerful chord in the hearts of the audience.Footnote 32 The workers were middle-aged South Korean men in their fifties. They had all been through the hierarchical military regime of South Korea as well as the repressive developmental dictatorship and standardized rote learning of the 1970s and 1980s. They typified the modern father figure of South Korea, who does not express his feelings and who carries out his responsibilities to the fullest. It was considered a virtue for their generation to avoid expressing their feelings and maintain sobriety in order not to show their weaknesses to their families, who depended on them. These fathers’ struggles to express such resentment, sense of loss and frustration towards the irrational social event of a lay-off through Hamlet appeared to touch the audience's emotions.
One way of thinking about the actors’ perception of the roles they played is with reference to Brecht's idea of the ‘double role’.Footnote 33 The fictional characters of Hamlet in this play and the actual actors as workers existed in tension with each other. In other words, the actors of Hamlet for Only Nine Days bore the sensation of the actual selves of the workers and a civil activist who evaded complete transformation into the fictional characters of Hamlet and kept a certain distance from them. The actors’ double roles were reinforced by the dramatic structure of the production. For example, the video clip showing Lim, who played Ophelia, awkwardly memorizing the lines and struggling with the reading was inserted in Act IV to give the audience a sense of authenticity which, from another perspective, can be seen as a transformation of the original Hamlet text by the situation faced by the workers. The conversation between Claudius, asking the whereabouts of the dead Polonius, and Hamlet, responding sarcastically, was filmed in advance like a movie in the place actually related to CortCortec and screened onstage to foreground the workers’ struggles (IV, iii: 17–23).Footnote 34 This scene was an outcome of a compromise between the text and the actors, as the pedantic and cynical speeches in Hamlet could not fully convey the intentions of the workers. Choi, who played Gertrude, asked the directors to screen a video clip of the demolition of the CortCortec factory in 2013 after she stopped crying and disappeared from the stage in Act VI, to emphasize the idea that being sorry about Hamlet actually indicated being sorry about Jang.Footnote 35 These scenes showed how the process of creating performance texts was really impacted by the actual selves of the workers and the civil activist.
The production staff also played a ‘double role’. Chimyeongta, who was in charge of costumes, said during an interview that the staff members in stage design, costume, props and lighting were mindful of displaying their artistic skills in relation to the workers’ actual lifestyle. She recalled that they constantly tried to emphasize the fact that everything belonged to the local reality, while also trying to produce a dramatic effect. A typical example would be the fact that the sword used in the fight between Hamlet and Laertes was made from the neck of a guitar to remind the audience of the guitar maker CortCortec. Another example was the costumes: Chimyeongta used the clothes worn by the workers on a daily basis. The metallic labour union vests, CortCortec T-shirts, capes made of the banners at the sit-in site, tops with stencil-printed engravings of famous Korean artist Yun-yop Lee's ‘Song for Workers’, and pin-shaped badges distributed to those participating in the petition at the sit-in site, were all added to the play to underscore the workers’ commitment to their fight. The actors began the play wearing all these elements relating to their struggles. To show that they were returning to the look of workers before the lay-off, in the last scene they took off everything related to the struggles except the everyday wear of CortCortec T-shirts and hiking trousers.
In other words, the split identities of actors in Hamlet for Only Nine Days made a huge impact on the dramatic structure of the production. The directors and staff had no other choice but to seriously consider the double roles of the workers. The directors and staff refined Hamlet’s lines, fictional objects and characters’ clothes to reflect the actual workers and their struggle against the lay-off. In so doing, the directors and production staff aimed to publicize the workers’ actual situation widely.
Give theatre back to the people!
Who were the audiences of Hamlet for Only Nine Days? Janelle Reinelt writes,
[M]eanings are produced relationally. In [a] documentary, some aspects of the lifeworld of the spectators are evoked because they know beforehand or come to recognize the reality-based aspect of the performance. They may therefore take up the labour of learning about and integrating what they are experiencing with their own existential existence.Footnote 36
Hamlet for Only Nine Days was free from the conventional form of the director-focused production. The play was crowd-funded using Tumblbug, a Korean platform for raising monetary contributions from a large number of people based on social-networking sites. Most funds collected through Tumblbug were from the workers’ group supporting the CortCortec struggle, along with other organizations.Footnote 37
Accordingly, the workers’ groups and supporting civic activists who banded together to fight against CortCortec, including the workers in the play, were the main agents of both the production and the reception of this play. The staffing of Vibrating Jelly followed the same trend. Directors Hoon Ko and Eun-young Kwon are the only fixed members of Vibrating Jelly; other members, such as the stage designer, lighting director, visual media director and costume designer, joined temporarily to support the workers in their struggles. Regarding the significance of this aspect of the production, director Hoon Ko has said,
We wanted to show that this kind of work can be done in South Korean theatre. We thought the directors could meet all kinds of people away from their own individual fields of activity. We wanted to meet other types of audiences aside from those who simply want to enjoy and consume plays. I believe there are voluntary and active audiences. This is why we need to raise the question of why South Korean artists are so narrow-minded. Now is the time theatre-makers must give the tools of art back to the people.Footnote 38
A large portion of the audiences were actual workers supporting the CortCortec struggle. In my view, the possibility of experiencing an unexpected lay-off similar to that of their fellow workers increased the likelihood of their identification with what they saw: they might have felt they could become the main agents of this play. The relationship between acting and watching or activity and passivity in the structure of control and subordination was thus challenged by this production.
Final scene of Hamlet for Only Nine Days. Hamlet and Laertes are engaged in a fight. Photograph courtesy of Taeg-yong Jeong, 2013.
In the process, we might note an additional challenge, which was to the history of Korean Hamlet productions. Korean audiences first encountered Hamlet in 1951 during the Korean War. Actor Dong-won Kim from the theatre company Shinhyeop played Hamlet. In this performance, Hamlet's famous monologue, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’, created a sensation, which resonated with the internal agony that Koreans had had to endure during the war. The play was a phenomenal success, attended by about four thousand spectators in a theatre designed to accommodate only about eight hundred, despite the war.Footnote 39 After the 1951 production, audiences called actor Dong-won Kim ‘the eternal Hamlet’.Footnote 40 The play later became a suitable object for Korean directors to experiment on with Korean-style directing aesthetics, while also enjoying exposure on the international festival circuit. For example, HamyulTaeja by Min-Soo Ahn (1976), Hamlet by Jeong-Oak Kim (1995), and Hamlet by Yun-Taek Lee (1996) showed Korean versions of Hamlet by dismantling the original Shakespeare with exorcism and shamanism. The new millennium ushered in modern reinterpretations of the play, such as Hamlet by Geun-hyeong Park (2011), who changed the ending so that Claudius remained alive, or The Lost Tears in Hamlet by Hyeon-tak Kim (2015), who changed the characters into people living today.
By comparison with the conventional performances of Hamlet, which were subject to experimentation by the directors’ personal theatrical aesthetics, Hamlet for Only Nine Days turned the audience into more active agents than usual, and enabled them to participate in the play's documentary-style reflexivity. In Act IV, for example, this stemmed from the fact that the dialogue between Ophelia and Hamlet did not flow naturally in order. Ophelia says, ‘My lord, I have remembrances of yours, that I have longed long to re-deliver’, to which Hamlet replies, ‘Are you honest?’ (III, i: 93–4).Footnote 41 After this conversation, the screen showed a video clip of the rehearsal with Lim playing Ophelia and Jang playing Hamlet, struggling with their interpretations of the characters. After the video clip, the conversation onstage went back to the beginning, proceeding with the next dialogue. Ophelia said, ‘My lord, I have remembrances of yours, that I have longed long to re-deliver’, to which Hamlet replied, ‘Are you honest?’. Here, the directors added Ophelia calling ‘My lord!’ and Hamlet asking, ‘Are you pure?’ (III, i: 104). But when this conversation was over, there was another video clip of the rehearsal with Lim playing Ophelia and Jang playing Hamlet, struggling with their interpretations of the characters. Act IV repeated this process multiple times. The cross-cutting of the video clips and stages amplified the comic effect of the scene in which Lim, with his solid muscular build from thirty years of making guitars, was costumed awkwardly in a woman's dress to play the feminized role of Ophelia. Accordingly, conventional binaries, such as men/women, workers/nobility, old/young, or firm muscular build/soft body were collapsed, creating a distorted, anti-authoritarian and subversive laughter onstage.
When the video clips were projected, the actors watched them with the audience. Thus as well as seeing the video, the audience saw the actors, as part of the audience, watching the video. In turn, audience members were encouraged to see themselves in those actors. The production's onstage spectatorship encouraged the audiences to become engrossed and to get involved in the acting process.
Theatre not only reflects the reality of the places where it happens, but also acts as a medium that creates a different reality. Documentary performance is a mode that makes a virtue of this attribute, and the fact that Hamlet for Only Nine Days gained critical attention implies that it may be ripe for rediscovery in South Korea. As theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout points out, today ‘politics is made to reappear, not by means of a “political theatre” that proposes agendas or even critiques specific injustice, but by means of a politics of theatre, in which the form's entanglement with the constitution of political relations is exposed’.Footnote 42 I think Hamlet for Only Nine Days is a ‘political theatre’ that critiqued the injustices of the lay-off at CortCortec, but it also shows a ‘politics of theatre’ that expose and restructure the relationships between directors, actors and audiences due to the documentary style. As such, the event can help us to see the production, performance and reception of theatre differently. And what I have described above illustrates the importance of the workers’ troublesome self-consciousness about theatrical participation, something that documentary-style reflexivity was able to reveal.
