Localizing Shakespeare: A Study of Tradaptations of Hamlet Productions

Abstract

The world-wide significance of Hamlet is evident that Shakespeare is regarded as a classic indispensable to the repertoire in the theatre of Korea. In fact, Hamlet is the most frequently produced play in Korea during the last two decades. Some productions recorded great box-office success localizing the play with ‘tradapted’ versions in various ways. Among them, four most controversial productions during 1990’s are selected to be analyzed in which Lee Yun-taek’s Hamlet (1996) and The Trouble-maker, Yonsan (1995), Lim Jae-chan’s Invitation. 1997 Spring, and Kim Ah-rah’s Hamlet 1999 were included. Lee’s The Trouble-maker, Yonsan is a certain kind of ‘tradapted’ production in which the Brechtian and the Artaudian theories as well as the ritual and the expressionism fused with Korean traditional elements were found during the play. Lee put a tyrant, Yonsan from Chosun dynasty into the position paralleled with Hamlet in terms of the theme of revenge. As in Hamlet, a ghost enters in the opening scene dancing a slow movement, a shamanic rite, Gut is performed under the direction of Yonsan as the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, and at the end, Yonsan kills all major characters who are connected with the death of his mother. Compare this to Kurosawa Akira’s Ran, it would be considered as one of the qualified tradaptation of the localized Hamlet. Lee’s Halmet is an another example of the tradaption, which make a great box-office success in front of the local audience as well as of the global audience in Russia. In this production, Lee keeping the authenticity of the source text tried to create an intercultural performance mixing some Western elements with their Korean counterparts: rearranged the sequence of scenes and non-verbal elements; used Korean mask dance, percussion quartet, Young-nam Deotboigy dance, the local mise-en-scene composed of the inside of Cheon-ma-chong, Budhist monk garment, and mixed the sound and music of the Korean instruments with piano and violin. This production would be a good attempt to expand our contemporaries through deconstructing Christian tradition with Korean shamanism. Lee’s intercultural production would begin to interchange between the East and the West expanding Shakespeare’s authenticity for all global/local audience. Lim Jae-chan’s Invitation. 1997, Spring transformed the blood-shedding revenge tragedy into a trial play. It is Fortinbras who is a judge in this trial. The scenes of the source text were rearranged according to the process of the trial, and just sitting their seats in the auditorium, the audience spontaneously took a part in that trial as the jury. This trial format, of course, reflects the contemporary socio-political milieu of the Korea. Kim Ah-rah’s Hamlet, 1999, on the other hand, shows another way of tradaptation. Using the confucian ideology of ‘hyo’(filial duty) and ‘choong’(loyalty) instead of Christian counter part, Kim transformed melancholy Hamlet in meditation to unrestrained popular one of an elaborate action. Shakespeare often serves as a touchstone to test not only the potentiality of local culture in their integration with the global, but also the localizability of the global. The outstanding and somewhat puzzling innovations of the selected productions in this essay would be awkward to the Western audience because of their local settings or names, metatheatrical frames and tradaptation. However, as Bharucha argues, “It is only by accepting that the translation process is constantly being interrupted, reversed, and questioned from multiple angles, not just between theatre cultures but within the intercultural differences of these cultures, that we can begin to embrace the joyous difficulties of working on Shakespeare in ‘foreign’ contexts” (278).