How did this project based on We Do Not Part by Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Han Kang come about?
Julie Deliquet: It was a proposal from Tiago Rodrigues, in keeping with Korean being the guest language of the 80th edition of the Festival d’Avignon. I had just finished working on The Unwomanly Face of War with the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, the first woman writing in Russian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Fewer than twenty women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1901, and even fewer have been non-Western. Before this project, the only work by Han Kang that I knew was one of her earlier novels, The Vegetarian. I immersed myself in We Do Not Part. At the heart of the book is the 1948 Jeju massacre, which claimed the lives of around 10% of the island's population. The massacre is connected to the aftermath of the Second World War, when the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea withdrew and transferred power to an elected nationalist, anti-communist president. I immediately recognized a strong resonance with some of the historical themes I am currently exploring. The Unwomanly Face of War gives voice to women who fought against Hitler's armies in the Soviet Union. In both cases, the goal is to shift our perspective, to examine the direct and indirect consequences of a major event in European history from a non-Western point of view. I found something deeply compelling in Han Kang's novel and its heroines, as well as in the literary and poetic gesture it accomplishes: a profoundly sensitive act of remembrance, a return to the history of her own country. It is a history that took a long time to be spoken about, narrated, and ultimately included in school textbooks.
What impression did the novel leave on you when you first read it?
Julie Deliquet: In recent years, I have been profoundly influenced by two major artists whose work I have adapted for the stage: Frederick Wiseman and Svetlana Alexievich. Both have created monumental bodies of work by tackling vast subjects while remaining deeply attentive to human beings and the smallest details that define them. With Han Kang, in We Do Not Part, there is, of course, the violence, the brutality of the almost documentary-like images that make us relive the historical event. But above all, there are the smallest gestures: caring for someone, keeping watch over an injured body, crossing the elements to preserve a fragile life. There is also the novel's sensory immersion, with its snow-covered landscape, as though the snow itself were settling over the massacre. Then there is the relationship between the two female protagonists, Gyeongha and Inseon: their need to create together and their inability to do so. And there is the accident, the severed finger, the hospitalisation, and the white parrot that must be fed. Gyeongha embarks on this quest only to reach a point where she no longer knows whom she is trying to save, or what her own place in the world is… In Han Kang's writing, history surfaces through the most intimate experiences. The novel constantly holds together the monumental and the minute. We worry about whether Inseon’s bird is still alive, but deep down we know that this is not really what the story is about. The bird is far more than a narrative device: it embodies what endures in the wake of catastrophe, a form of survival that compels us to act. It reminds us of our responsibility toward whatever remains vulnerable. I recognise in Han Kang the same attentiveness to human fragility that I found in Wiseman, who could spend hours sitting in a community centre simply listening to people talk. He was not trying to capture a fleeting moment; he simply wanted to be present within it.
“Bird” is the title of the novel's first part, but also the title of a chapter within that section. How did you choose the passages that are read during this reading-performance?
Julie Deliquet: Together with my artistic collaborator, Annabelle Simon, and with Han Kang's approval, we chose to focus on the novel's opening chapter. It tells the story of the friendship between Gyeongha and Inseon and sets in motion Gyeongha’s journey to feed Inseon’s bird while Inseon is hospitalised. We tell the story of the relationship between these two women, whose voices are embodied by Isabelle Huppert and Lee Hye-young, each speaking in her native language. Rather than simply dividing up the text between them, they each inhabit one of these two female figures, whose relationship forms the structural heart of the novel. Standing together, vulnerable in the vastness of the Cour d'honneur, these two actresses embark on a physical, emotional, and memorial journey that is greater than us. We leave the fate of the bird unresolved, just as we leave Gyeongha’s quest open-ended. Our hope is that audience members will continue this initiatory journey by reading the novel themselves.
The event is presented as a reading-performance. How do you approach this form?
Julie Deliquet: If a Korean woman and a French woman were to meet, they would most likely look for a common language in order to understand each other. In real life, I imagine that Hyeyoung and Isabelle would speak to each other in English. But for this performance, we deliberately chose to preserve the linguistic distance between Korean and French. In this dialogue between two worlds, between East and West, language itself becomes a protagonist, just as Jeju Island and the snow are characters in Han Kang’s novel. In my recent productions, I have noticed that speech increasingly becomes the central character. During rehearsals, I often place actors in situations where they have to speak without knowing exactly when they should begin. The question is no longer how to perform, but when to speak, why to speak, and for whom. Speaking itself becomes the subject, and the expression “to take the floor” takes on its fullest meaning. Welfare, The Unwomanly Face of War, and We Do Not Part are all works driven by the necessity of giving things a name: that is the true object of the quest. In Frederick Wiseman’s work, people begin to speak because they have nothing left to lose; in Svetlana Alexievich’s, the testimonies of these women emerge only after forty years of collective silence.
In the case of We Do Not Part, this act of speaking out also comes belatedly, because the tragedy of Jeju was suppressed by the authorities for many years.
Julie Deliquet: Yes, it is a past that was quite literally kept silent. To speak out presupposes that one has first been silent. And silence is not simply the absence of speech: it is something deeper, something that can seem endless. We, the living, bear a responsibility toward our dead. It is a responsibility that looks to the future and to generations yet to come. I am interested in those periods of latency that precede speech. After the Second World War, from the Nuremberg trials to the tribunals in Peace Palace, it took decades before Germany truly confronted its own past and began holding its own trials. With We Do Not Part, Han Kang does not undo the irreparable. Instead, she makes us feel the traces that history leaves behind in bodies, in landscapes, and in silence.
Interview conducted by Simon Hatab in June 2026