"The most fascinating story of Kafka."

- The New York Times

A nightmare of wandering through the darkness
A Kafkaesque world engulfs the audience

Before his death, Franz Kafka wished to burn this last unfinished novel of his, <The Castle>. Fortunately, that did not happen and to this day, this perplexing work continues to haunt our minds. The story is now being brought to the stage and presented before our very eyes complete with a mysterious and foreboding castle forbidding people to enter, ceaseless interruptions by strange villagers for seemingly unknown reasons, and a road leading toward the castle that curves in on itself and heads in the opposite direction before ever reaching it. K, an outsider, arrives in this bizarre and twisted place where everything is, at best, uncertain. Will he ever be able to navigate through this nightmarish maze and reach the castle?
Actor Park Yoon Hee, Director Koo Tae Hwan and Stage Designer Park Dong Woo won the Dong-A Theatre Award in 2007 for <The Judgment> by Franz Kafka. And once again, they have teamed up to deliver a strong performance with Kafka’s <The Castle>. The audience is sure to be daunted and even overwhelmed by the endless line of questions without answers coming from the stage. Ultimately, they will come to realize the grim truth that the world we are living in today is no different from the Kafkaesque reality and struggle K encounters on his way to the Castle.
 

Synopsis

K arrives in darkness in the small town at the bottom of a hill leading up to the castle after coming through a terrible snowstorm. He was summoned to do some land surveying at the Castle, but could not get there before nightfall. Barely able to find an inn to spend the night, K immediately faces the innkeeper and other townsfolk who are suspicious of the reason he gives for his visit. For the next six days, K struggles, but fails, largely due to the villagers’ watchful eyes, to meet the officer from the castle. It is as if everyone in the town has made a secret pact to thwart his every move. Even the few strange messages delivered via a messenger offer little help. Nonetheless K refuses to get discouraged and keeps striving to get to the castle.

Original Author: Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish writer born in Prague in 1883. He is regarded as “the pioneer of existentialism literature” and “one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.” His novels were written in German and based on philosophical existentialism. The writer had a prophetic perception, and used his unique writing style to describe and portray the absurdity of human destiny, and the anxiety and isolation of people under oppression. In fact, the literary term “Kafkaesque” came from his unique writing style, and ability to capture through his characters the struggles of life in puzzling and bizarre situations that seem to  doom them in the end. Kafka was influenced by the existentialism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, and later his works greatly influenced many absurdist writers, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugene Lonesco.

Adaptation: Lee Mi Kyung
Lee’s critically acclaimed debut play <That’s Not It> is often considered the work that heralded in the future of Daehakro plays. Since then, she has won both the Dong-A Theatre and Korea Theater Awards, and her works have been picked to be among the best seven plays by the National Theater Association of Korea and among the best three plays by the International Association of Theater Critics-Korea. Her plays are loved not only by members of theatrical communities, but by audiences at large.

Director: Koo Tae Hwan
Koo is the current president of Theater Soo, and professor of the Department of Performing Arts at Incheon National University.
He has steadily risen as a new and talented director in theatrical circles who satisfies the demands of artistic values and also appeals widely to the general public. He was greatly acclaimed by critics for <The Judgement> by Franz Kafka in 2007, and this time he has chosen another work by the same writer, <The Castle>. Koo started out as a theatre lighting designer, and has been steadfastly seeking meaningful ways of converting the sentences of literature into relevant expressions through plays on the stage. And in this case, Koo again joins forces with Park Dong Woo, the stage designer who worked with him for <The Gift of the Gorgon> and <The Family>, to convert the surreal and dreamy text of Kafka into a stage play with contemporary expression.