“Life is short. Like a lotus flower that blooms and falls.”
This line captures the emotional core of Sammaegyeong, resonating like a self-portrait of every actor who drifts across the stage. A moment of radiant youth that flares up, only to be lost to the relentless flow of time. Between the two lies an unfulfilled longing left behind, the true heart of this work.
Sammaegyeong, now returning to the stage under the National Theater Company of Korea, is more than a revival. Its initial run last year, marked by consecutive sellouts, critical acclaim, and recognition as one of the year’s “Top Three Plays,” proved that the production was not a fleeting sensation but a theatrical event that deeply penetrated the sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Its return after just half a year feels less like an extension of success than another measured breath, testing its vitality as a lasting repertoire piece.
The roots of Sammaegyeong lie in Ham Se-deok’s play Dongseung. A cornerstone of modern Korean drama, the original text distilled the wounds of its era and the fissures of the human interior into poetic language. Director Lee Cheol-hee builds upon that solid framework with a distinctly contemporary touch. Rather than preserving the original as a static classic, he boldly unsettles and reshapes it, allowing the work to breathe again in today’s sensibility. This resistance to the classic is not an act of destruction but one of renewal.
While the play speaks about theater, it ultimately speaks about life. The actor on stage is a figure expelled from time, obsessed with a role he believes he failed at 35 years ago. He wanders the theatrical space as if it were reality, even attempting to return to an old rehearsal room after death itself. Yet even upon reaching the moment he has longed for, he never fully becomes that role. The repetition of failure resonates beyond the stage, touching anyone who has ever been trapped by a single moment in their own life.
Lee Cheol-hee’s direction resists melodrama. Through restrained movement, measured pacing, and rhythms of repetition and variation, the audience is slowly drawn into the play’s breathing tempo. On stage, actors are not only characters but seasons, winds, and green shoots forcing their way through frozen ground. Rather than following a plot, the audience inhabits a state, something close to samadhi, or deep absorption.
Actor Ji Chun-sung adds another layer to the work. Having played the young monk Doneom in Dongseung in 1991, he now returns to this world decades later. When the burden carried by the character overlaps with the actor’s own history, Sammaegyeong begins to resemble an autobiographical record of theater itself, folding personal time and Korean theater history into a single space.
At its core, the play observes the human condition of living while embracing failure and incompletion. In a society that demands constant achievement, Sammaegyeong quietly turns its gaze toward unfinished lives and irreversible choices. Enlightenment does not arrive after everything has been achieved; it emerges from the act of accepting what was never completed.
Even if life passes like a lotus blooming and falling, the traces left by passing through that time with one’s whole body do not disappear. Sammaegyeong is a play about those traces, offering a quiet yet profound reverberation to those willing to face them.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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