Mother

“Would you like to see my heart, burnt black as charcoal?”

Mother: Hwang Il-sun, born 1928 in Cheongjin, North Hamgyong Province.

A joint production by Theatre Company Arirang and Yeonhui Street Theatre Troupe, both celebrating their tenth anniversaries — sketched by Yeonhui’s Lee Youn-taek and coloured in by Arirang’s Kim Myung-gon.

As the curtain rises, Mother lies asleep — but we are inside her dreams, among the sorrows that ruled and at times destroyed her life, and the shadow of death. Uneasy about dying, she waves the shadow away: she still has things to do; she wants to learn to write and sign her name at least once. Holding her mute seven-year-old grandson and the ancestral spirit jar she brought when she married, she retraces her past — parting from her first love Yang San-bok, being married off for three paddies of rice land, liberation, the Korean War — moving between memory and the present. The memories peak with the death of her son Chan-seong during the wartime flight. At a spirit ritual for him, she weeps holding his soul. Only then does she let go of the spirit jar and, leaving the three syllables of her name — learned from her granddaughter — on the window pane, ends her life of sorrow.

Traditional work songs, boat songs and weaving songs drive the drama, while Park Dong-woo’s set, Ahn Ae-soon’s choreography and Lee Sung-jae’s music heightened its power.