|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Festival in Seoul, celebrated his career and contributions. He also received the Venezuela Third World Theater Contest's Special Award (1985). In 2003, he was chosen as the best contemporary playwright by the Donga-Ilbo, a major Korean newspaper's survey of Korean theater personnel.
His plays often require active deciphering by readers due to his characteristic use of metaphorical allegory, an inevitable but also effective means to combat repressive theater censorship in the 1970s and 1980s in Korea as one of the voices that constituted social consciousness of the time. Nevertheless, his plays refuse to be defined easily in a sociopolitical context in the sense that his plays rather strive to demonstrate the author's ceaseless affection for human values such as truth, loneliness, and sacrifice of an individual. While his concern with outside repressive forces and his affection with the socially weak are skillfully represented through the use of theatrical allegory in the early plays such as Five (1971) and Watchman (1973), later he wrote more about metaphorical and existential themes as in Wedding (1974) and Chaos and Order at a Gallery (1975), and he borrowed the themes from popular Korean folk tales and narratives as shown in the case of Spring Day (1984).
Kang-baek Lee's plays have drawn attention from international theater circles as his plays have been invited to international theater festivals, which gave rise to a demanding need for the translation of his plays. As a result, the Polish translation of Five, Three, Watchman, and Wedding was published by Pod Wiatr Press in Poland in 1997, under the title of Lee Kang-baek Dramaty, the first single translation book of his plays ever published outside Korea. Then, the French translation of modern Korean theater was published by L'Harmattan Press in April 1998 under the title of Théatres coreens: sept pieces contemporains anthologie, which includes his play Homo Separatus. The German translation of his plays, including Travel Journal to Yongwol, Spring Day, Watchman, and Wedding, was published under the German title of Es ist weit von Seoul nach Yongwol by Peperkorn Press in