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Artistic dossier

In 2016, at the invitation of the National Theater Company of Korea (NTCK), Arthur Nauzyciel created the stage version of Kim Young-ha’s best-selling novel, The Empire of light.

Kim Young-ha is one of the leading figures of a new generation of Korean writers who are developing a critical and melancholy vision of South Korea. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times. It is noteworthy that the National Theater Company of Korea entrusted to a foreign director the staging of this dense, polemical novel that lays bare the social fractures of Korean society.

Kim Kiyeong is married to Mari. He is an ordinary man like many others. The couple live in Seoul, where in dull anonymity they blend in. The arrival of an email suffices to throw their ordinary existence into turmoil. A few cryptic lines – « order number 4 » – take Kim back to what he was in the past: a spy, who has been operating in South Korea for over 20 years. Suddenly, this ordinary man has only 24 hours to return to his native North Korea and abandon the life he had carved out for himself without anyone knowing who or what he was. Division lies at the heart of this stage production, combining live performance and film sequences that guide the narrative. A nation, severed in two, suffers from an unhealed wound; as the hours go by a man and a woman grow further and further apart; the end is a collapse of two souls, spelling rupture and estrangement.