Tomorrow evening I fly to Seoul with director Sita Calvert-Ennals for a week-long research trip exploring the Korean Divided Families Reunion Programme.
(Park Yun-Dong, 90, with a photograph of his brothers)
We’ll be meeting with Red Cross representatives, BBC journalists, non-government experts on the divided Koreas problem, Korean artists with their own take on the separations and going on an essential excursion to the ironically-titled Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).
The official agreed reunions programme between North and South has been running intermittently for the last fifteen years, administrated by the Red Cross but cancelled from time to time when the long-running attrition between the two halves of the peninsula flare up.
This ranges from accusations of attempted border infiltration to wrangling at a higher political level – often involving use of airspace by South Korean/USA counterparts or the North Koreans’ continuing and ominous-sounding ‘missile tests’, which seem to be broadly understood (though hardly well-veiled) political code for nuclear launch capacity.
As such, the reunions have often been cancelled at very short notice. This year, 97 individuals from the North and 90 from the South will be waiting with baited breath for the go-ahead.
From the beginning, this intimate connection between global powers – the USA, North and South Korea – and the individuals whom desire simply to reunite with their loved ones after fifty-three years apart, has fascinated us.
People often tell you that the personal is political, and in playwriting it’s not uncommon to get that as sage advice: try and find the human dramas where the two things are tightly wrapped around one another.
The political-personal experience in the Korean peninsula before you even get to this fairly recent initiative of reunions is highly-charged. These reunions amplify it, and it’s that moment of amplification – which, we recently discovered, in 2015 will serendipitously be taking place exactly during the time of our visit – that has drawn us to the stories of those within, around and connected to the reunions.
We’re working with an interpreter in Seoul who’s been doing some initial research for us. As well as lining up various interviews she’s also been sending us clips from YouTube, including footage from a series of programmes from June 30th – November 14th 1983 called the KBS Special Live Broadcast ‘Finding Dispersed Families’ which sought to re-connect family members.
This particular clip she sent us (view from 52m30s) shows one of these moments of ‘amplification’ I’m referring to above.
Please, please take a look before you read the rest of this blog – it’s an unbelievable outpouring of emotion, both humbling and terrifying in its power: humbling because it shows how human beings are capable of containing and then expressing such emotion, and terrifying because I hope neither my children nor I ever have to experience anything like it.
However it’s these moments, first encountered by the Sita and I in photographs and then a newsreel, which originally caught our eye when the idea came up two and a half years ago in a chilly room in Residence in Bristol. We wanted to find a way to explore these moments on stage. Now, watching the footage, I realise that’s impossible to do in any specific way naturalistically (though, to our credit, I think we had an inkling of that beforehand).
But it goes beyond that – I’m not sure that these moments can be ‘written’. Danced, maybe. Shown physically. Heightened, poeticised. Illustrated through gestures in silence. Held in the gaps in-between the unspoken. Alluded to. Piled into the subtext. Whatever we start to do out there, it feels like we’re headed towards a form of theatre that is quiet, understated, metaphorical.
That may well happen through language too, not just the other apparatus of the stage (plus I don’t want to second guess the form before we’ve even left British soil) but it feels like the heights of emotion we’re encountering require us both to explore a new aesthetic in our work together: new theatrical languages that pull on all of our sensibilities as human beings as well as professional story-makers.
I’ve been teaching adaptation recently at the universities of Bristol and South Wales, and a quotation I discovered seven years ago from Peter Hall about staging Greek Tragedy has come back into my mind.
He refers to the use of full mask in the original stagings of the tragedies in Athens as absolutely necessary – and necessary then, in his contemporary productions, because there is no way on Earth anybody could naturalistically stage the emotional states explored through the tragedies.
Think of Medea murdering her own children, Andromache knowing her baby will be dashed on the rocks beneath the walls of Troy, Iphigenia being destroyed by her own father to win safe passage to battle. How do you ‘play’ those moments?
Hall’s suggestion is that the experience can only reach us through a combination of poetry and image – the raw emotions too dangerous, too violent for anybody to recreate, and demanding to be wrought through other means. He refers in addition to Shakespeare’s poetry as a mask in its own right, serving a similar function.
All of this points towards an expressive, heightened and poetic rendering of human experience, rather than one that relies solely on writing fabulous dialogue and knowing how to spin a great plot.
I’ve been particularly interested in the recent writing of director Philip Zarilli, exploring his entirely silent production of The Water Station which seems to operate in a similar theatrical realm.
His playwriting partner in crime, Kaite O’Reilly, also refers to the work of the same production company (The Llanarth Group – and interestingly in another East Asian context) in relation to The Aesthetics of Quietude; namely the principle of silence and the qualities it renders in both the work, and the audience experience. These are useful models to have swirling around in my head before departure.
A final thought – any of you who take the time to read these blogs will know I bang on a lot about research-led writing, and in this year particularly, how the research (and process) aspect of playwriting has derailed my voice somewhat.
So in relation to the thoughts above, I have another key aim to embrace in our research trip to Seoul: to change the nature of my research. To observe, to listen, to watch, to think. To fuss less over dates and facts and endless transcriptions of never-ending interviews. To embed less in historical details, to feel less like I can only write something or should only write something if I’ve made myself some kind of micro-authority on it.
That’s not the play we’re setting out to make. We’re exploring something much more fundamental, that sits in the cries and wails of the parted, the halves of people made whole again, and the necessity of the human spirit to keep hope alive.
That’s not about historical accuracy – that’s about absorbing this trip, reaching deep inside myself, and looking for something which, despite its extremities, is a universally recognisable experience for all human beings.