The Birth of Political Shakespeare: Ki Kukseo’s Hamlet Productions in the 1980s

Abstract

This paper attempts to survey a series of experimental Hamlet productions under military dictatorship, when assassination, coup d’etat, usurpation, corruption, and state violence were daily realities in the 1980s Korea. When freedom of speech was curbed, Shakespeare’s old, foreign story was endowed with contemporary and local meanings, and became an apt vehicle of political reflection and social communication. This is localization in a more profound sense, not just dressing the Bard in drag or setting his plays to folk music and dance. The understanding Korean audience did not come to the theatre appreciate a Western masterpiece or to enjoy a polished performance, but to participate in an intellectually stimulating and emotionally disturbing experience. While Shakespeare’s concern in Hamlet is primarily about the royalty and nobility, the common people take center stage in these Korean adaptations—as bystanders, innocent victims, and maybe even involuntary accomplices, who see that the time is out of joint but feel incapable of setting it right. Thus recontextualized, Hamlet is a tragedy not of an individual or a family, but of the entire society afflicted by madness and terror. In a sense, the performance on stage is no more than a rehearsal, in preparation for real action outside the theatre.