Directorial Polarization of A Midsummer Night’s Dreams in Korea

Abstract

During the turbulent period from the 1990s to the present, when Korean society has experienced radical changes and various crises, Korean theatre have produced so many Shakespearean productions based on Korean social realities and theatre traditions. Shakespeare’s representative comedy such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception. Many of Dream productions of this period have focused on the dark side of the original play. Even though Dream would be usually regarded just as a funny and romantic comedy, its background is much darker than imagined. On the other hand, another group of Dream productions has shown the quite opposite tendency. They have created a much brighter world than the original play, erasing even its dark vestiges. This group employed traditional Korean theatre forms in common and tried to achieve ‘sinmyong,’ the state of excessive mirth for both the performers and the audience. When a Koreanized Dream production tries to follow the form of the traditional Korean theatre more thoroughly, Shakespeare’s pessimistic vision can be replaced by sinmyong. This sinmyong maximizes the festivity or the rituality of the play in return for sacrificing its philosophical darkness. While the dark group of Korean Dream performances can be said to reflect the dark realities of Korean society, the bright group of Korean Dream could be ritualistic attempts to be relieved of such dark realities. Korean Dreams, which showed the directorial polarization of extremizing the darkness and the brightness of the original play, must have extended Shakespeare’s possibility, even though they may disappoint those who want to enjoy Shakespearean texts as they are.