You are adapting a novel by South Korean writer Han Kang, Nobel Prize in Literature. Why did you choose this particular novel, published in English under the title We Do Not Part?
My relationship with Han Kang’s writing is not new. Two years ago, I adapted another of her novels—The Vegetarian—for a show which premiered at the Autumn Festival in Paris and toured in France, Switzerland, and Italy. She is an author who resonates with me, both through the stories she chooses to tell and the way she tells them. In We Do Not Part, her most recent novel, she weaves together two levels with great subtlety: one fictional and dreamlike, expressed through the relationships between the characters, and the other political, dealing with violence in the history of her country, South Korea. The personal and the historical come together in a final narrative layer, ever-present and never quite certain: that of the dream.
The historical event in question is the Jeju uprising of 1948, whose bloody repression resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
The division of the two Koreas took place in 1948, in a particularly intricate and complex context. When we speak of violence, it is not only about the bloody repression by the army, which claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. It is not only about a blind and terrible crackdown, carried out under the complicit gaze of so-called “allied” countries, nor about the ban imposed on victims’ relatives from searching for their bodies. It is also about the very possibility of telling this traumatic history, which was silenced for decades. One of the most compelling dimensions of the novel is that it raises the question of the second generation: those who did not experience these events themselves but uncover this past that was meant to be erased, and who come to realise that it leaves behind ghostly traces that continue to shape their lives.
How does Han Kang’s writing engage with this traumatic memory?
Han Kang’s writing approaches this event from a distance, digging through the different layers that time has deposited in the soil and in people’s consciousness. She follows two friends, one of whom is the daughter of a survivor of the massacre: a mother who endured it in her body and was marked for life, yet could not or did not know how to share what she had lived through. In Han Kang’s work, history is like a torn fabric that needs to be stitched back together. It takes about a hundred pages before the story of Jeju is even addressed. The author refuses to approach the tragedy in the way the news would: by naming cities and counting the dead. Instead, she writes about a bird that one of the friends left behind on Jeju Island, a bird that might die if it is not fed. It is as if, before reaching Jeju and its history, one must prepare oneself: confront the everyday difficulties of life, make space for dreams, practice empathy, weave connections with others, care for a bird, speak for a few minutes with a woman at a bus stop, accept the unpredictability of the weather, and tend to the small, living things. Only then are we ready to hear this story and can be allowed among the ghosts.
Why did you choose Che dolore terribile è l’amore (What a terrible pain love is) as the title of the play?
Because alongside this learning of empathy, the novel is punctuated by small and large pains: headaches, stomach aches, a finger severed while chopping wood with an axe… As if, once again, this were a way of preparing us to experience the pain and loss brought by the revelation of the story of Jeju. This is rather unusual in our societies, which tend to anesthetise pain, to make it disappear with heavy use of painkillers, without listening to what it has to tell us. That is why I chose to bring together the words “pain” and “love.” We need to feel things, to allow ourselves to be moved. It is also a way of making clear that this production is not a straightforward adaptation of this vast, multifaceted novel, but rather a theatrical way of passing through it.
You borrow from Georges Didi-Huberman the expression “archive of love” to describe Han Kang’s relationship to history.
It is a non-official, non-academic way of telling history. It does not stand against historical narrative; rather, it offers another way of approaching or welcoming the past. I was also guided by the anthropologist Chowra Makaremi’s essay Résistances affectives, les politiques de l'attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté (Affective Resistances: The Politics of Attachment in the Face of the Politics of Cruelty). This history is conveyed through an emotional relationship to small things, through personal stories, letters, songs… On the margins of the major events recorded in history books, Makaremi speaks of the small, everyday gestures of resistance to injustice. In the novel, there is this mother figure, fragile, isolated, nothing like a political activist—yet her entire life is no less an act of resistance.
How do you think you will approach adapting this novel?
I am an actress and I use stage writing to create a performance rather than working from purely intellectual concepts. The way Han Kang weaves together the present and the invisible, the living and the absent, of course resonates with the theatrical experience and the craft of acting. But I am guided above all by the non-linear relationship to time that the novel develops. That is one of its extraordinary beauties. All temporalities are superimposed. The snow falling and settling as powdery drifts evokes the powder of the bones of the disappeared bodies. Everything is always intertwined, fragmented. It is a major challenge to translate this relationship to time to the stage. One has to accept getting lost in order to find that delicate balance between understanding and mystery that characterises Han Kang’s work. At first glance, things appear fragmentary, almost autonomous from one another, but fragile, uncertain, sensitive connections gradually emerge. We therefore chose to immerse ourselves in the night the two friends spend in the carpentry workshop. It is a haunted night, which provides a kind of unity of place for the narrative. Finally, another key thread we can follow is a work of art the two friends want to create together but which never comes to fruition for reasons that are only partially explained: an art installation inspired by one of their dreams, taking the form of ninety-nine black wooden posts, carved from tree trunks and planted in a snowy field. It is a project that links art with a silent landscape, as a way of giving voice to nature and to the absent.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in March 2026