SerpApi.Org
The 1989 film “Dead Poets Society” has settled into the peculiar afterlife of a classic — quoted more than watched, its “carpe diem” motto migrated into graduation speeches and onto forearm tattoos, the film itself something people are certain they admire without quite remembering.
Now that time-old masterpiece has come to Daehakro, the heart of Seoul’s theater scene.
“Dead Poets Society” is an Academy Award-winning film that tells the story of a group of students at a prestigious New England boarding school who form a secret society as their creative outlet after a new and eccentric English teacher, John Keating, arrives at the institution. It follows the leader of the group, Neil Perry, navigating the demands of his strict father, academic pressures and his budding relationship with Keating before culminating in tragedy.
The staging at Daehakro’s NOL Theater in central Seoul, running through mid-September, is the first officially licensed production of original screenwriter Tom Schulman’s story in Korea, two years after its Paris debut. The 2024 French version sold out two seasons, drew some 350,000 people, and took six Molière nominations across five categories.
Working only from a handful of photographs of the French staging and Schulman's original film script — which had no scene breaks or stage directions — the Korean producers shaped the adaptation entirely on their own, according to theater director Cho Kwang-hwa.
Although “Dead Poets Society” may seem like a timely fable against the current educational crisis in Korea, Cho and the producers did not mount the play as an indictment of the system.
“At school there’s a teacher and a student, but out in society there are bosses and new hires, in the army there are seniors and juniors, and in life there’s always someone who walked the road ahead of you,” Cho said during a press conference for the play at NOL Theater in Jongno District, central Seoul on Tuesday. “It’s a universal story, and, tie it too tightly to one system, it only shrinks.”
The pressure felt by the characters of “Dead Poets Society” is not abstract to the people staging it. Actor Oh Man-seok, one of three actors playing Keating, spent his last year of high school hiding part-time wages from parents who would not look at him when he said he wanted to act, saving in secret for a weekend acting academy that met on Sundays.
“Helping someone find the way for themselves through good questions, and when that way is blocked and they come back, throwing them a better one and searching for the answer together — that, to me, is what good teaching should be,” Oh said, when asked what he thought a good education consisted of.
On “carpe diem” itself, the Latin phrase meaning "seize the day" the film helped popularize, Cho is almost rueful. Everyone knows it and it sounds easy, but we call ourselves free while quietly governed by advertising algorithms and the schooling that shaped us, forever worrying about the future. What the word means to him is smaller: “The moment I step into a scene, communing with the actor across from me, feeling that here, in this instant, I’m breathing with that actor and the audience — that, for me, is carpe diem.”
The three actors playing Keating have declined to converge, which Yeon Jung-hoon — acting on a stage for the first time since his debut, as is Cha In-pyo — takes to be the point, and reason enough to see the show three times. Cha, at 59, has the longer view.
“In the original, Keating is in his early 30s, but I’m older, so I’ve lived more than 20 years he never got to in the story,” Cha said. “Having lived those years, I’ve come to feel through experience that what he said was right.”
If Keating is the film’s gift, Nolan, the overbearing and rigid school headmaster is its residue, and actor Park Ji-il — who doubles as Nolan and as Neil's father alongside Nam Kyung-eub — resists the easy word for both.
A "kkondae" (a slang term for a boomer or a condescending older person), the phrase audiences reach for in describing Nolan, is a cynical little compound, yoking the put-down for a domineering man to the honorific for an elder, according to Park.
Nolan and Mr. Perry force their values on others in the same way — missing the human being underneath — so that Neil is driven to catastrophe. What “Dead Poets Society” locates in that ruin is not a villain but a failure of imagination — an adult so certain of the one “right” path that he cannot see the child who is seeking the route.
“The story is ultimately less about schooling than about the distance between generations: Every era hands down its values through its teachers and its fathers, and the question the play keeps asking is whether love that arrives as control is still love, or only its costume,” Park said.
“Dead Poets Society” runs until Sept. 13 at NOL Theater in Daehakro, staged in Korean. Tickets range from 60,000 won ($40.50) to 120,000 won.
BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]
