Cover ‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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A North Korean sleeper agent builds an entire false life in the South, only to be discovered by his wife — Kim Young-ha’s popular novel gets a stage remake in Hong Kong this week
When French theatre director Arthur Nauzyciel first read The Empire of Light, a novel by South Korean writer Kim Young-ha, he was drawn to its emotional depth beneath the surface of espionage and disguise. The work tells the story of a North Korean sleeper agent who builds an entire false life in the South—a life that gradually, imperceptibly, becomes real. Alongside him is a wife who, after 20 years of marriage, realises that the man she loves is a stranger. The characters’ opposing journeys—one losing himself in a carefully constructed lie, the other awakening from it—form the emotional centre of this haunting production, which will be presented at the Hong Kong Arts Festival on March 20 and 21.
The project was commissioned by Seoul’s Myeongdong Theatre, later part of the National Theatre Company of Korea, which invited Nauzyciel to adapt Kim’s novel for the stage. The decision to bring in a foreign director was deliberate. As Nauzyciel explains, it was about “distance”: a chance to see the story without the political and emotional conditioning that might affect Korean directors. “On both sides, north or south,” he says, “people have been raised and educated with prejudices about the other. Maybe someone from the outside can see things with less of that, and focus instead on more universal themes.” From the Korean producers’ perspective, his outsider’s eye promised a rethinking of familiar history.
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Above ‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Reading the book for the first time, Nauzyciel was immediately compelled by both its atmosphere and its scale. Yet he also recognised the challenge of transferring such a dense, many-layered narrative to the stage. Rather than attempting to reproduce the novel in full, he centred the adaptation on the relationship between the husband and wife: their betrayal, the erosion of trust, and their shared disorientation in time. He was fascinated by how “a fake life becomes the real one”, and how the passage of years allows silence and habit to overtake truth.
For Nauzyciel, meaning in theatre lies not in explicit messages but in emotion and sensation. “Theatre is not to deliver a message,” he says. “It’s to materialise something beneath the surface, to give form to what has none.” In his adaptation, he worked with writer and artist Valérie Mréjen and filmmaker Pierre-Alain Giraud to interlace live performance and projected film, crafting a space where memory, dream and history coexist. The result is less about retelling a story than about evoking ghosts. It is about resurfacing memories of a country, a family, and a past that cannot be reclaimed.
Above ‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Before rehearsals began, Nauzyciel engaged the South Korean actors in a kind of oral history exercise. He asked them to recall their earliest impressions of North Korea—what they had been told as children, what images or propaganda had shaped their imaginations. Their recollections found their way into the performance: stories of grandparents’ warnings, cartoon propaganda from childhood television, and the old reprimand never to waste rice because “in North Korea, children don’t have rice”. For the director, these fragments reveal how personal memory and national myth are woven together. “It’s not spectacular,” he reflects, “but it says a lot.”
The cast united prominent Korean screen and stage actors: Moon So-ri, a major star known for her nuanced film roles in Oasis (2002) and A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003), and Han Joon, a respected figure from the theatre and musical stage. Their pairing has brought together the two different creative worlds of cinema and theatre.
The collaboration between actors and director was notably communal. Nauzyciel describes long rehearsal-room discussions shared over homemade food. “We built the show not only through stories but through care for each other; sometimes the crew would bring Korean food to share,” he says.
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Above ‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
‘The Empire of Light’, a play about a North Korean spy adapted by Arthur Nauzyciel (Photo: courtesy of NAH Inu National Theatre Company of Korea and the Hong Kong Arts Festival)
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Bringing The Empire of Light to Hong Kong now, Nauzyciel admits to the familiar mix of excitement and unease that comes with opening a production in a new city. When performing abroad, he often spends the premiere night as “a very anxious spectator”, trying to read how unfamiliar audiences respond, what moves them, and what they perceive that he did not expect. “It’s always interesting because you learn about where you are through the comments people make,” he says.
That act of cultural translation—of allowing a story to become everyone’s and no one’s—is what most fascinates him. By approaching a Korean story through French eyes, and now sharing it with Hong Kong audiences, The Empire of Light traverses geographic and emotional boundaries alike. To Nauzyciel, theatre is not simply an art of representation but one of invocation: “a place to evoke and convoke things”, as he says.
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
