This study focuses on the phenomenon of the historical play emerged as a possible "modern form" in the 1970s theater, and aims to define the cause and the meaning of how the method of representing history through theater stage changed during that peri...
This study focuses on the phenomenon of the historical play emerged as a possible "modern form" in the 1970s theater, and aims to define the cause and the meaning of how the method of representing history through theater stage changed during that period. The beginning of the 1970s was marked by the continued reign of Park Chung-hee regime and the declaration of Yushin government, which led the intellectuals to question the concept of history as the story of enlightenment. It was a concept that held faith in the plot of history as a gradual idealization of human society based on Reason, and it was how history had been viewed by the Korean intellectuals since the April Revolution (4.19). However, the growing distance between the reality and this ideal forced the intellectuals to rethink what they had once believed. Crossing over the from the 60s to the 70s, the theatrical people left behind their traditional attitudes toward the stage as a place to merely store history, and came to take the perspective of exploring the existential meaning of history through the theatrical platform. However, the previous studies on the 1970s historical plays became stuck in politicizing the works, and cut them into two opposing sides as either resisting the ruling regime's discourses or collaborating with it.
When we think of historical plays as a genre that exists as a mixture of history and theater, historical play is a point in which the reality of "history" meets the "theater" as a media of representation. Historical play is characterized by how it represents history to the audience, by recalling history, which is separated from the present in its temporal space, to the moment that the audience inhabits. Therefore, in this framework, the reversed relationship of "what was represented" defining "what is to be represented" comes to the fore. The theaterical people of the 1970s focused on how history could be fluidly represented by the combination of dialogue, stage mechanism, and objet, and thereby deconstructed the traditional forms and rules of historical plays from the previous era. However, such experimentations on genre were done differently depending on stage, theater troupe, ideology, literary trend, and style that was connected to the conditions of the 1970s theater environment. Thus, this paper studies the forms of historical plays of “spectacle”, “imagination”, and “meta” as three different modes that were developed in the topography of theater during 1970s.
The National Theater Company of Korea focused on performing historical plays in order to retain its value during the 1970s changing cultural circumstances, when translated plays, film, and television emerged as other forms of such media. The Jangchung-Dong National Theater, which opened in 1973, equipped with modern facilities and the system of cooperations for exclusive organizations, worked as the base for supporting performances of historical plays. Its opening play "Great Hero Admiral Yi Sun-shin " was written to perform on a large theater with revolving stage and platforms capable of horizontal and vertical movements, and without any pauses between scenes it represents many temporal spaces of Chosun-era on the same stage at the same time, all coming together for the central narrative. "Namhan Mountain Fortress" and "Roar" also actively employ stage mechanics to reflect opposing spaces in a singular totality, while also cyclorama, subtitles, and chorus to elevate a character's innermost feelings into national ethnic sensibility. Combining technical aspects and crowd performing elements, the reason why National Theater Company of Korea's historical plays were performed in such great spectacles is because they wanted to broaden the history as it is represented on stage to have the scale of national ethnic identity. Here, National Theater Company of Korea's historical plays goes further and reveals its desire to appropriate the hear-and-now moment of the play, as it is performed before the audience, to become a part of the historical time by employing ethnic nationalism. "Great Hero Admiral Yi Sun-shin ", "Namhan Mountain Fortress" implores its audience to see themselves as yet another subjects of the nation who are witnessing the historical event from the future. "Jingbirok", "Heihe", "North-facing Grave" together insert a temporal space that mediates between the represented history and the present that the audience inhabits, and as a combined sequence works to create a temporal period of history.
In contrast to the National Theater Company of Korea, which saw history as prelude to the present and could be used as a device to teach morality and ethics, the playwrights who began their career in the 1970s applied ahistorical or anti-historical elements to their works to explore history's existential meaning. The writers such as Choi In-hoon, Noh Kyung-shik, Oh Tae-suk used archetypes that originate from fables, myths, dreams, and spirits as the imaginaire to draw out the hidden movement that leads history in the form of "history of imagination." "What will become of us when we reunite", “Tower", "Shooting Arrows toward the Sky" are based on stories recorded within "Samgukyusa" and "Samguksagi " that have strong fable-like imaginative elements, and such elements were emphasized and enlarged by the playwrights to show the opposition between the Imaginary in which the individual's desires are realized and the Historical sphere in which such desires are repressed. The stage is expressed by the abstract sense of line, light, and objet that does not point toward any specific period of history, and the characters on the stage traveling through temporal spaces that cannot exist within the Historical sphere: these were the methods brought to the foreground those counter-memories that could not be spoken of in the officially canonized version of history: the violence of the nation-state's hierarchies, paradoxes of the class system, personal sacrifices, and et cetera. In other case, "Tae" and "Doong Dong Nakrangdoong " allow those people who have exited from the Historical sphere to reenter the event on the stage as spirits, and thus shows how transcendental historical movements that are unrelated to neither political stance or ethical reasons lead history as its most elementary force. Such historical plays that represent the history of imagination seek to prospect on history from outside of the historical time. and they share the common preception of circulating and repeating elements within the Imaginary as the real point of origin of history.
Another phenomenon from the 1970s historical plays is the appearance of meta-historical plays that question the performance and the representation of the history on stage itself. The playwrights Yun Dae-sung, Yi Gang-bak, Kim Sang-yeol, Oh Tae-suk, and Yi Hyun-hwa rejected the illusionary theatrical conventions that fooled the audience into thinking that the event represented on the stage as real history, and instead wrote and published such texts that grafted the methods of meta-drama onto the genre of historical play. "Executioner" and "Slave Deed" are plays that use double structured methods to create a tension between the space in which the history is being reenacted and the space outside of the play that is seeing it happen. "Naema " produces a situation in which the official historian who is writing the history gets involved in the situation that he is writing about, and intentionally confuses the border between the one who is watching and the one who is being watched. Through these methods of meta-drama, the relationship between the watcher and the watched that was once hidden in the theater of illusion is revealed, and bring to the fore the aspects of the pluralized perception of history fighting against the discourse of the singular dominating perception of history. "The Living Singing Flower", "Sachugi ", "Cadenza", "Ostracismos" lead the characters, who cross back and forth between history and present by using the liminality that occurs in the space of meta-drama, to fall into indeterminate confusion. This strategy ceases the audience's thinking that history is severed from the present, and leads the audience to perceive that the meanings of historical past and now-present are simultaneous coming together.
National Theater Company of Korea's historical plays of spectacle stop short at applying basic concept and style of earlier historical plays onto the large, modern theater, while historical plays of imagination continue the legacy of fallacies of historical romances, period pieces, and fables that existed outside of historical play's common sphere to deconstruct the official version of history to draw out the perception of resistance. Also, the works of meta-historical plays that appeared in the 1970s question the relationship between history and theater itself, thus pointing out the alternate possibility for the historical play. This study sheds a light on the entire topography of the 1970s historical plays, which had only been understood in fragmentary sense, and locate within the texts of the plays how the perception on representing history on the theater was changing in that time. The study expects that approaching historical plays via theater as a media of representation will lead to defining wholly the modern aspect of the 1970s historical plays.