Numbness

“If it weren’t for this fence, the deer and roe would be free to roam, wouldn’t they?”

Sgt. Choi: “They say in your last months you even dodge falling leaves. Mine-sweeping? Trying to get somebody killed?” Pvt. Han: “If it weren’t for this fence, the deer and roe would be free to roam, wouldn’t they?” Pvt. Kang: “Rather than nurturing hatred of the North, we have to recover the affection we had as one people.”

Numbness follows a university student forcibly conscripted and posted to the DMZ. Against the barbed wire where the reality of division is starkest, it portrays the anguish and struggle of a new generation trying to overcome it.

While many madang-geuk and national-theatre works of the time dealt with labour and anti-American issues in a rather rigid way and struggled to reach wide audiences, Numbness was praised as “national theatre that is both entertaining and accomplished,” thanks to its slick scene changes and clean staging.

What the play confronts is society’s numbness to the pain of division. The army — where the contradictions of division are most concrete and where people are most violently forced to stop feeling them — is seen through the eyes of Kang Jin-u, sent to the front line after leading campus protests. Episodes include a civilian woman gathering herbs in the DMZ who is raped and killed by American soldiers, a farm boy’s parents arrested as spies because of a relative in the North, and a soldier mistakenly shot at the fence whose death is falsified as an attempted defection.

Ju In-seok revised his 1984 script, first staged at Seoul National University, for Arirang; it was entered in the 2nd National Theatre Festival. In 1987 the Public Performance Ethics Committee had banned it for dealing with problems inside the military.