SEOUL– South Korea’s leading playwright stage director Oh Tae-seok died on Monday night, his theater troupe, Mokwha Repertory Company, said Tuesday. He was 82.
He had worked for about 40 years as a playwright, theater director and producer since he founded a theater company named Circuit Stage in Seoul as a university student in 1963, directing over 60 original theatrical works.
He established his own independent theatrical world with experimental and creative plays combining styles as disparate as traditional Korean plays and contemporary avant-garde theater.
Oh also worked to preserve and revive overlooked dialects from the Korean language. For this, he collected various dialects not just in Korea but also in Korean towns in China’s Yanbian and Japan’s Osaka, and through performances developed them into theatrical languages, contributing largely to the creation of a general stage language in Korea.
Born in Seocheon, South Chungcheong Province, Oh made his debut as a writer with his play “Wedding Dress,” which won the annual new writers’ contest hosted by the daily Chosun Ilbo in 1967. He formally debuted as a playwright the following year when he won a prize in a competition co-hosted by the National Theater and the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper for “Change of Season.”
He later worked as a professor of the Seoul Institute of the Arts and an art director of the National Theater Company of Korea, and received the grand prizes at the annual Seoul Theater Festival and the Donga Drama Awards, among others.
He is best known for such works as “The Life Cord” (1974), “Chunpung’s Wife” (1976), “The Bicycle” in 1984, “Intimacy between Father and Son” (1989), “Why Did Sim Cheong Throw Herself into the Sea Twice?” (1990), “Romeo and Juliet” (1995), “My Love DMZ” (2002), “Equally Matched” (2005), “The Tempest” (2010) and “Acorn” (2016).
In 1984, he founded the Mokwha Repertory Company, where he nurtured a number of actors who later became famous on the big and small screens, including Yoo Hae-jin.
Oh, however, was trailed by sexual misconduct allegations in his later years.
Source: Yonhap News Agency