Han Kang's 'We Do Not Part' finds intimate voice on Seoul stage

On a stage stripped of almost everything but white, actors Isabelle Huppert and Lee Hye-young summoned a snowbound island. There were no trees, no hospital bed and no visible parrot to rescue. Yet as the French and Korean actors read from Han Kang’s novel, their voices and languages supplied the scenery: severed fingers ache and snow gathering around an unseen house. “Oiseau,” a bilingual reading play drawn from the Nobel laureaute's “We Do Not Part,” made its Korean premiere at Sogang University’s Mary Hall on Saturday — exactly two years after Han won the Nobel Prize in literature, a date Korean literature fans affectionately call “Han Kang Day.” Presented through Sunday as part of the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF), the production brought July’s Avignon Festival premiere from the roughly 2,000-seat outdoor Cour d’honneur at the Palace of the Popes into a 500-seat indoor theater. The smaller space sharpened its defining quality: intimacy. Dressed in white, Huppert and Lee stood amid white fabric in front of reading stands. Huppert voiced Kyung-ha in French