Interview: Korean adaptation of 'Carthage' draws steady support for universal themes

Korea Herald

2 days ago

Intense whodunit asks how much society should intervene in people's lives
For British playwright Chris Thompson, 'Carthage' holds a special place in his heart. It was his debut work, the first of his plays to be adapted into another language and an honest response to his 12 years of service as a social worker in London.
Now, the third Korean-language production of "Carthage," staged by theater company Secret Base under the direction of Shin Ji-ho, is enjoying yet another sold-out run.
"Carthage" is being staged at the Quad Theater in Seoul's Daehangno theater district through Sunday. In Korea for the first time to see a performance, Thompson described the experience of watching his own words unfold in another language as 'strange and surreal.'
'It hit me in a visceral way, rather than being about the language,' Thompson said in a postshow conversation with The Korea Herald last week.
'I wrote this play 10 years ago while I was still working as a social worker. So this play and the characters have lived in my heart for a very long time. I wanted to write something honest and responsible that reflected the world that I was working in.'
'Carthage' begins with the death of a teenager named Tommy, who was born in prison. The story jumps through time to unravel who is to blame: his mother, Annie? Marcus, the prison officer who was present at the time of his death? Or Sue, the social worker who cared for both Tommy and his mother?
The open-stage design of the drama places the audience on all sides of the stage, evoking feelings of a jury in a courtroom, silently deliberating on guilt and responsibility.
Despite the play's grounding in the UK's social care system, its popularity in Korea suggests the themes transcend borders.
'I think the structure of the story pulls people in because it's basically a whodunit,' Thompson said. 'We always want the easy answer, like in an Agatha Christie murder revelation, but it's not that simple.'
And even though the play was written in a very UK-specific context, Thompson said he was trying to write something universal about guilt, blame and responsibility.
'I think people recognize the characters and the conflicts, the dynamics, the dilemmas that are going on.'
The idea for the play came from a study Thompson read, which found that some juvenile offenders in prison would deliberately create situations in which they were restrained and held by prison officers because they were not receiving hugs, affection or natural intimacy from their families.
Reflecting on his years in the field, Thompson admitted that the most honest response he could give about intervention by authorities was 'often more about wishing we had the courage to leave them alone and accept the risk.'
"If I'm honest, would (children) have been better off if we had left them alone and not brought them into the system? Because the system that is designed to help can do more harm than good. The children in the UK, the ones that come out the other end, sometimes come out worse, even though we've tried to help them.'
Emotional balance
For director Shin, who brought the drama to Korea, it was the play's exploration of social structures, institutional systems and issues facing youth that drew him in.
'And what I focused on most was balancing the characters' positions — their professional standpoint and their personal, human one,' said Shin.
'If we approach them purely through their roles, they feel overly institutional. But if we lean too far into emotion, they become untethered from their professional identities, and we end up empathizing with them too much, losing a sense of critical distance. I was constantly trying to walk that middle line.'
He also chose not to give the audience too many clues about Tommy's death.
'The entire play moves toward Tommy's death, but I wanted the audience to encounter fragments of events, just like we do in real life — when one incident occurs, we're often left to piece together meaning from scattered assumptions and speculation. I wanted to condense that chaos into something more focused.'
He layered in tools like overlapping voice-overs and audio recalls that both expand the storytelling and subtly plant narrative hints.
One of Shin's most intentional choices in this third run was to resist immersion.
'Most importantly, I didn't want the audience to get too emotionally absorbed. Just because something is portrayed realistically doesn't mean I want it invading people's own lives. I thought a lot about preventing that,' he explained.
That is why the director added an unexpected video segment at the end, right after Tommy's death, that is seemingly irrelevant but very much on purpose.
'Well-made, polished theatrical worlds don't interest me much anymore. I wanted to twist it at the end and disrupt that illusion a little.'
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