N. Korea prison camp makes for an unlikely musical

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – As far as musicals go, seeing people
break into song on subjects such as starvation and public
executions in North Korea may be one of the most unlikely
concepts for stage entertainment in several years.

Producers held a preview in Seoul on Tuesday of the musical
called “Yoduk Story” that features goose-stepping North Korean
soldiers and deprived prisoners wondering if they can survive
into the next day.

The musical is about a North Korean woman’s fall from a
dancing revolutionary hero to a tortured inmate along with her
family at Yoduk prison camp, where she bears a guard’s child,
and learns to forgive her brutal captors.

The production is meant to be an irony-free look at life in
a North Korean prison camp that could change the way the North
is depicted in South Korean entertainment.

Songs in the musical include “You are just like germs” and
“All I want is rice.” The producers hope audiences can find
beauty in the misery of life in the prison camps.

Some of South Korea’s top movies have been spy thrillers
where agents from the two Koreas overlook their political
differences and begin to bond, or sentimental stories about
families ripped apart by the political divide.

But “Yoduk Story” writer, director and North Korean refugee
Jung Sung-san says South Korean audiences have never really
gotten a taste of the atrocities committed at the notorious
political prisons in the North he was lucky enough to escape
after three months.

“This is not somebody else’s business. This is happening
just a few hours from here,” Jung told reporters. “We want to
convey the reality of what is happening.”

Washington and human rights groups accuse North Korea of
having one of the worst records on human rights in the world
with a network of political prison camps, guilt by association
and public executions to intimidate the masses.

Rights groups have criticized South Korea for not pressing
North Korea hard enough on human rights, while Seoul said it
prefers quiet diplomacy with the North on the sensitive
subject.

The show opens to the public on Wednesday for a 19-day run.

Jung, who said he put one of his kidneys up for collateral
to borrow money from a loan shark to stage the 700-million won
($714,000) production, believes he can make enough money to
repay the debt and pay the cast and crew.

“It has been really hard and lonely,” he said, adding he
hopes to take the story to film when the musical’s run ends.

Jung, 37, from a relatively privileged background, was
arrested for listening to a South Korean broadcast on the
radio, a minor infraction for people in his class, but
discipline had been tightened after the unexpected death of the
communist leader, Kim Il-sung, in 1994.

Jung said the South Korean government did not try to hide
its unease about the production, at one point sending out
agents to try to coerce him into abandoning the project.

South Korean officials have said Jung has the right to free
speech and they do not censor theatrical productions.

South Korea has seen its ties with the North improve
rapidly since a unprecedented and unrepeated summit of the two
Korea’s leaders in 2000.

Pyongyang also reacts angrily to any charges of human
rights violations. On Tuesday, its foreign ministry spokesman
called U.S. criticism of its human rights record part of “a
smear campaign,” and vowed to step up its military-first
policy, saying “human rights precisely mean sovereignty.”

($1=980.4 Won)