Lee Hye-young: 'Reading theater is an adventure — Isabelle inspired me'

Korean premiere of reading performance 'Bird' set for Oct. 10-11

Second Korean to perform at Avignon after world premiere in July

Production draws only from Chapter 1 of 'We Do Not Part'

Actor says nerves ran high, but Huppert's ease showed the way

Actors Lee Hye-young and Isabelle Huppert perform in "Bird," a reading performance that had its world premiere at the Avignon Festival in France in July. [Arts Management Support Center]

"Strange. Looking at the snow with you like this." (Inseon's line from "Bird")

In the summer heat of France last July, the memory of a blizzard settled beneath 700-year-old stone walls in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des Papes — the iconic centerpiece of the Avignon Festival, the beating heart of world performance arts. That opening line from "Bird," the first chapter of Han Kang's novel "We Do Not Part," set against the backdrop of the April 3 Jeju Uprising, filled the air through the voice of Lee Hye-young.

Inseon speaks those words while gazing at white snow falling past a hospital window, but the strangeness she describes is not merely a change in weather. For Inseon, snow is silence and absence — the weight of grief that erases the boundary between the living and the dead. The snow that once fell mixed with Jeju's biting winds presses against the wound where Inseon lost her fingers in a carpentry accident, a medium of requiem carrying the indelible pain of massacre.

Not a single snowflake drifted across the stage, yet Lee — performing in Korean — and French actor Isabelle Huppert, 73, performing in French, stared together into an invisible blizzard. It was a moment when two gazes crossed the same abyss, braving an unseen storm side by side. Lee, 64, the first Korean actor to stand in the Cour d'honneur, reflected on that moment.

"The creative energy we generated — a strange, foreign language could have been heard like music, or simply like sound."

Having completed the Avignon run, Lee will meet Korean audiences on Oct. 10 and 11 at Sogang University's Mary Hall Grand Theater in Seoul, as part of the 26th Seoul International Performing Arts Festival. Huppert, who shared the Avignon stage with her, will also travel to Korea for the performances.

Ahead of the Korean premiere, Lee met with reporters at the Daehangno Arts Theater in Seoul. "'Bird' is a work that captures the process of carrying literary sentences into sound," she said. "Because it covers only Chapter 1 of the novel, it portrays the friendship between two friends and the fragility of human beings rather than historical scenes."

An obsession 'like war' — and Huppert asking: 'Why try so hard to be perfect?'

The road to the stage was one of agonizing solitude. An unfamiliar outdoor space, a role demanding emotional depth, the uncertain distance to the prompter — even for a veteran of Lee's stature, a bilingual reading performance at Avignon was uncharted territory.

"I had never performed on a stage that large," she said. "My eyesight is poor, so I could not predict where the prompter would be or how far away it would sit. The obsession with doing everything perfectly wore me down. From the moment I left Seoul, I was already agonizing alone, like someone heading into battle."

What pulled Lee out from under that pressure was her encounter with Isabelle Huppert. The two celebrated actors — one Korean, one French — first met at the home of director Hong Sang-soo before departing for Avignon.

"She showed up at the director's place from the airport with just one suitcase. No manager. I thought it was so cool — 'Is this the French way?' (Laughs.) I had prepared for every possible scenario, determined to hold up my end no matter what. But Isabelle had read the script only once."

Actor Lee Hye-young [Arts Management Support Center]

The two actors' approaches to preparation could not have been more different. Even when Huppert visited Korea to attend the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, "Bird" was the main topic between them. Huppert had read the script only once then too, and chose to listen to a recording rather than read it again, citing eye strain.

"She actually turned it back on me and asked, 'It's a reading performance anyway — why are you trying so hard to be perfect?'"

Working with Huppert became a source of inspiration for Lee. Watching Huppert communicate fluidly with the crew to shape the performance opened Lee's eyes to a different way of working.

"She would ask the staff to reposition the prompter screen, or to change the text color at every point where a Korean line ended. (Laughs.) But nobody seemed burdened by it. Unlike me — carrying every load alone, walking an isolated path — Isabelle was someone who worked with others. It was a time when I learned a great deal more about what it means to collaborate."

The first rehearsal took place in an enclosed room — a different kind of challenge from standing on a 2,000-seat outdoor stage. Lee arrived in Avignon three days before the performance and rehearsed every day, but that first rehearsal remains the moment she cannot forget.

"It was the scene where Inseon and Gyeongha cook mung bean porridge and calmly talk about running away from home as students, about the wounds their mothers left them. The emotion surged up all at once. Everyone in the room felt it — some even cried. But after that, that same emotion never came back the same way on stage."

Director Julie Deliquet demanded more than a simple reading — she called for a performance that sank into the characters' pain. Lee did not force or wring out the emotion from that first rehearsal. "I just go with whatever the air of that day brings, but when the feeling is not there and I still have to cry out in front of 2,000 people, the emotion does not match," she said. "For the Korean performances, I think conveying emotion will come more naturally since I will be performing in my mother tongue."

At Avignon, Han Kang herself read the novel's final lines, but that element will not be part of the Korean production. Perhaps for that reason, Lee said she expects it to feel "like a completely different work from Avignon." She added: "The reason it was so powerful when Han read it is that those lines are the very heart of what this work is trying to say. Han reads them plainly, without emotion, coolly, without forcing any weight into them. I think it will depend on who comes in and how they read it."

'Western? I'm a thoroughly Joseon woman'

France had long been a place of contemplation and longing for Lee. "I once wrote about Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and used it to explain why I loved France," she said. "I loved France because of couples like Sartre and Beauvoir — never married but together for nearly 50 years. And yet I have never actually met French people like that in real life." Having lived in Paris for two years, Lee found that France, beneath its romance and allure, left its mark on her as a place of loneliness.

"In Korea, people often describe me as 'Western,' but I do not feel that way at all. When I first came to Avignon 30 years ago, in 1995 and 1996, I was drawn to and curious about foreigners. Now I feel none of that. If anything, I feel that I am a deeply Eastern — a thoroughly Joseon — woman."

Lee has recently been pulled back into the spotlight after her character Audrey from the KBS2 drama series "I'm Sorry, I Love You" went viral as a meme through entertainment programs. She did not hide her complicated feelings about a past drama series living on through endless replay.

"One reason I love theater is that it leaves no record. But with a drama series, even though that is not who I am now, it is still out there saying 'that's me.' I am grateful that Audrey from 'I'm Sorry, I Love You,' and my more recent work, are loved. But the arc of the life I have lived and the days I want to live run far deeper than that. The judgment, though, belongs to the audience — however they choose to remember me."

It is a declaration in favor of the volatile and the present — something that ignites with each breath and dissolves into the air — over a past frozen in permanent preservation. The path Lee walks as an actor connects directly to the reason she chose this life.

"I became an actor because I thought this work would make me happy. Reality was too hard to bear without the dreams I found watching films. I want to be a dream for people who still dream, the way I do."

shee@heraldcorp.com