The Avignon Festival in France, known as the country’s largest theater event, has placed a spotlight on Korean language and culture this year, presenting a rare opportunity to experience contemporary South Korean storytelling on Western stages. The festival, which runs through Saturday, features the debut of South Korean directors Jaha Koo and Lee Jaram, alongside the presence of 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang, who appeared as a guest of honor.
Central to this year’s Korean focus are two productions inspired by Han Kang’s 2021 novel, *We Do Not Part*. One, a staged reading titled *Bird* and directed by Julie Deliquet, was performed on the festival’s most prestigious stage—the Cour d’Honneur of the Papal Palace. The other, an Italian-language adaptation called *What a Terrible Pain Love Is*, directed by Daria Deflorian, was presented in the open-air Cloitre des Carmes.
*We Do Not Part* narrates the story of Kyungha, a writer and historian in Seoul, who receives an urgent request from her longtime friend Inseon after an accident leaves her hospitalized. Kyungha travels to Inseon’s remote home on Jeju Island to care for her parakeet, gradually uncovering the history of her friend’s family and the brutal massacres carried out on Jeju in 1948 and 1949 under the pretense of anticommunism. The novel’s complex layering of historical events and shifting timelines were portrayed differently in each production.
The *Bird* reading featured two acclaimed actresses: France’s Isabelle Huppert and South Korea’s Lee Hye-young. On the sparse stage, furnished only with lecterns, Huppert performed in French as Kyungha, while Lee spoke Korean as Inseon. Subtitles in French, English, and Korean facilitated understanding across languages. The bilingual format underscored the emotional and physical distance between the two friends prior to Inseon’s accident. The staging incorporated subtle projections of falling snow, contrasting with the warm Avignon weather, to evoke the novel’s wintry setting on Jeju.
Huppert’s restrained, measured delivery brought an appealing simplicity to Han’s prose, a departure from some of her more theatrical recent roles. Lee’s performance introduced a more assertive energy, reflecting Inseon’s quiet resilience in confronting her traumatic family history. Together, the two actors read through the novel’s opening section before Han Kang herself joined the stage, reading aloud passages describing the Jeju massacres in which an estimated 30,000 people were killed.
The Italian adaptation, *What a Terrible Pain Love Is*, incorporated Han's text into a visual tableau centered on blackened logs—an image symbolizing a memorial project conceived by the characters in the novel. The production featured three performers—Anna Coppola, Daria Deflorian, and Monica Piseddu—who moved the cut logs around the stage while delivering excerpts of the text. While the visual symbolism was striking, critics noted that the production’s consistent tonal approach made the narrative’s complex layers harder to follow. Additionally, external noise from nearby World Cup semifinal spectators reportedly disrupted the performance.
Together, these two distinct interpretations of *We Do Not Part* offered audiences at Avignon a multifaceted engagement with Han Kang’s work, broadening appreciation of Korean literature and its historical contexts on an international platform.