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Theatre
The Last Empress
1 star
Michael Billington Tuesday February 5, 2002
Life is full of mysteries. And one of them is what on earth this overblown Korean musical, part of the official cultural programme for the World Cup, is doing in downtown Hammersmith. There are echoes of western musicals but it seems to be based on the principle that "anything you can do, we can do worse." The main problem is that, unless you are well up on 19th century Korean history, it is virtually incomprehensible. Study of the programme, however, reveals it is about Queen Min who, in spite of her overbearing father-in-law, attempted to modernise the Chosun dynasty and open it up to western influence. But she paid a price. First she suffered a palace coup. Then, caught in the crossfire between China and Japan, she was assassinated in 1895 by Japanese samurai. Finally she became the subject of this inflated musical. I have no wish to mock. For Koreans, the story of Queen Min may have mythic resonance. The subject of an eastern country torn between its feudal past and forcible modernisation is also a fascinating one as Stephen Sondheim proved in Pacific Overtures. But the problem is that the story strikes few chords in western breasts. Hee Gap Kim's score, with a staggering 58 numbers, also has a hurtling, filmic anonymity. The lyrics by In Ja Yang, however good in Korean, lack a certain something in English: "modernisation is my chosen policy, we shall not return to our naivete," for instance, does not trip off the tongue. Undeniably the production by Ho Jin Yun, with its 600 costumes, is an eyeful: we get twin revolving stages, martial arts exercises under a banner of dragons, diplomatic and trade emissaries on stilts, royal French lessons under a parasol. But, although the director marshals his forces with some skill, the production smacks of internationalised kitsch. The only individual to emerge with any clarity is Tae Won Yi who brings to the heroine a crystalline soprano voice - heard recently in The King and I - and a personality suggesting a Korean Mrs Thatcher. But it remains a bizarre enterprise. Although the final number is a choral anthem hymning "independency," the show itself is the artistic equivalent of the process by which local Korean companies have surrendered to foreign control. The story may come from the east but the show's rhetorical style suggests a doomed attempt to become the Korean Les Miserables. · Until February 16. Box office: 0870 606 3400. |
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