(All photos by Brett Lindquist)

Shakespeare and a Shower of Shite

By JL Copeland

Alright? Do you prefer Shakespeare or a shower of shite?

How about both?

Music for this week?

Sometimes the language of Shakespeare is superfluous for a good boogie. Get your chicken on with a shot of Link Wray:

A few months back, I culture-vultured it up. Tango and theatre. I’ll get to the tango next time, that one’s a goodie and deserves its own post.

I trundled into Seoul to watch The Taming of the Shrew by the Seoul Shakespeare Company.

But before I detail my unfortunate experience, a few common questions about acting in Korea:

Is theatre popular in Korea?

Yes. Daehangno is Seoul’s main theatre area, with dozens and dozens of plays run by independent theatre companies on every night. There are also regularly top-class theatre productions and musicals with both local and original Broadway/West End casts.

Can a foreigner become an actor in Korea?

If you mean become a professional actor, to be honest, it’s going to be extremely difficult. It doesn’t matter how well you act, bare minimum you’ll need to be fluent in Korean. I don’t mean ‘pretty good,’ I mean native level.

The acting profession is fiercely competitive in Korea anyway (my wife is an actress so I have an unfortunate insight into just how desperate it is), and also Korean dramas are not diverse like foreign dramas.

Put it this way: I have never seen a non-Korean actor in a lead role in a major drama, or even a supporting role. Perhaps in a minor comedy-drama as a supporting character.

I have known a few people who claimed they were working as full-time professional foreign actors in Korea, and the peak of their career was two or three lines in a serious K-Drama. The rest of the work was low-quality web-dramas no one has ever heard of or appearing in advertisements for the Korean Tourist Board and similar.

Foreigners usually appear on Korean TV in a look how strange/awkward/funny/stupid this guy is when he interacts with our culture kind of role.

Remember how bad the VIPs from Squid Game were?

This is the other issue. Even if you’re a great actor and your Korean is top-notch, most Korean directors are not fluent in English, so as long as the actor looks like a foreigner and sounds like a foreigner, how well they actually act or deliver their lines is irrelevant.

So, if you’re a foreigner with ambitions to star in a K-drama, unless you’re already a huge star in the West AND are fluent in Korean (and don’t mind trashing your reputation as a decent actor), probably think again.

How to get into acting in Korea?

Well, I wouldn’t bother as a professional, but as an amateur? To start, seek out one of the local foreign theatre troupes; the main ones being Seoul Players and also the aforementioned Seoul Shakespeare Company. They usually have at least two productions per year, so go and audition, as I did last year. Also check out Get in the Van.

The Taming of the Shrew featured a number of actors (including one of my co-stars) from the 10-minute Play Festival (if you missed that hog trough to Matterhorn tale, you can read all about it here).

I had also been asked to audition for TTOTS (I politely declined), so I wanted to see what I might have missed out on.

Thank fu*k I didn’t sign up.

Shakespeare is hard.

At least for a semi-literate mouth-breather like me, it is.

It’s one thing to act. Another thing to act stuff you have but a greasy finger on a thread of a trailing tassel’s understanding of.

That said, the players were brilliant, and the play was very funny (but I never noticed so much as a doublet-sporting harvest mouse, never mind a shrew).

Although my enjoyment was slightly spoiled by a fellow audience member (let’s call this shower of shite Mike Hunt).

I was sitting in the second row, slightly above the stage below. I was quite self-conscious of not distracting the actors who were right there, metres away.

But not Mike Hunt, beside me.

About five minutes into the play, he was already checking his phone. I blew air through my nose and wrinkled by brow, to no avail.

Next, Mike was filming. I performed my loudest sigh, but Mike had the self-awareness of a sponge in a snowstorm.

Then, the final straw. While Petruchio was right there before us, delivering lines so close I could smell the samgyeopsal* he’d had for lunch, what was Mike doing?

He was playing back the video he’d recorded a few minutes earlier to his female companion and mansplaining the previous scene.

Shakespeare and a shower of shite indeed.

*Korean pork barbecue

Enough was enough. As the curtain fell for the interval, I resolved to take action. I’d correct this sorry situation, once and for all.

You know me too well.

Yep, I moved to an empty seat as far away from Mike as possible.

Can you top that? Have you encountered worse behaviour by an audience member? Hit me with a comment below and spill your guts.

Speak Soon,

JL

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