What Remains of Us
News
New play explores ‘What Remains of Us’ after 50 years of separation
Tuesday, 8 February, 2022Over the past two years, many of us have had the unfortunate experience of being separated from loved ones: missing birthdays, holidays, Christmas dinners, or just everyday, face-to-face conversations over a cup of tea.
Imagine being separated for half a century.
Now imagine having the chance to meet them again, after all that time. A new play, What Remains of Us, co-created and directed by Bath Spa Senior Lecturer Sita Calvert-Ennals, imagines one such reunion, between a woman living in Seoul and the father she hasn’t seen since she was three, who lives in Pyongyang.
The play is based on real life events. When the armistice was declared to halt the Korean War in 1953, hundreds of thousands of families were left divided on either side of the Korean Demilitarised Zone. In 2000, the state began organising reunions between separated North and South Korean families, with a select few invited across the border to temporarily reunite with family they haven’t seen in over 50 years. After these reunions they’ll never meet again.
The idea for the play started when Sita and the writer, David Lane, decided they wanted to work together on a project. They knew they wanted to tell a true story, so they began meeting up once a month and bringing each other news stories.
“We found this tiny little 60-second BBC clip of a Korean man preparing to meet his brother for the first time in 55 years,” Sita explained. “And the extraordinary thing for us was that he was deciding what presents to take to his brother, because he didn't know anything about him. He didn't know anything that had happened to him in the last 50 years. So we just watched that little clip and went, ‘My goodness, that is an absolutely extraordinary story. We need to know more about this!’”
Thanks to a British Council and Arts Council grant, Sita and David were able to travel to South Korea for a week to research and develop the project. Amazingly, by sheer coincidence, the week they were there the reunions were actually taking place. They were able to interview people who had taken part in or had overseen the programme, which Sita said gave them “loads and loads of material, and we kind of felt like we'd started to know a bit more about this subject, and also how we might want to make our play.”
The play has been supported and developed with Doosan Art Center in Seoul, Korea National University of Arts (KNUA), Bath Spa Productions, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Bristol Old Vic, Arts Council England and Judy Owen Ltd.
In addition to the writing and production of the play, David and Sita launched another project, working with students from Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and from Bath Spa to explore their own personal experiences of separation.
Both sets of students read the play, then chatted to each other via Skype about their responses and what they thought the themes were. Afterwards each student created a short autobiographical film about their experiences of those themes, which have been grouped together and will be shown alongside the play in the foyer of the theatre and, later, shared online.
It’s been quite a journey from that small BBC article to the opening of the play - including delays due to COVID, and having to re-cast one of the lead roles - but now this extraordinary story is finally ready to be told.
What Remains of Us opens at the Bristol Old Vic on 3 March. More info and tickets are available on their website.
Masthead image credit: Kirsten McTernan