One smart Korea move

You have to travel a mighty long way in this day and age to winkle out a bona fide theatrical legend who has yet to receive the Loose Ends treatment from Ned Sherrin. Past the Oxus, over the Pamirs, beyond the Gobi Desert and the Great Wall down through the last outpost of the cold war to South Korea and Seoul, home to Oh T'ae-Sok and the Mokhwa Repertory Company, nationally revered playwright and players respectively.

Quite why Oh T'ae-Sok has suddenly decided that London might be an appropriate place to stage one of his plays he never manages to explain. The sprightly 60-year-old is regarded as one of the most important dramatists and directors working in Asia today, but beyond a brief, highly successful foray onto Broadway in the 1970s, his focus has been absolutely local. His work is part of a forceful attempt to rebuild a proud indigenous culture after the devastation of years of occupation, war and dictatorship that throttled Korea for the first two-thirds of the last century. This week, for the first time, one of his plays is about to be produced in London, at the Union Chapel studio in Islington, and he has decided to come over with his own company to perform here in November.

It is love of his own culture, rather than fear of another, that has kept Oh T'ae-Sok focused on Korean audiences for so long: "On Broadway I wondered whether I should continue as a director and writer. I felt it was my destiny. I returned home and realised how beautiful and precious Korean culture was - masquerades and shamanism and so on - and I felt richer than Rockefeller. I was not part of the young people who had felt that following westerners was the only way; I always felt following what we had was how we would survive. I wanted people not to forget what our ancestors had done. I believe it is my duty to let the young people of the time understand the background of the country and current affairs. I had faced the Korean war, aged 10 and I was badly spiritually wounded by the experience. Returning to my home town in the country helped to heal those wounds through the love of neighbours and traditional Korean values."

The importance of ancestry, traditional culture and values is the key to T'ae-Sok's work, which ranges in style from historical drama to absurdist comedy to heavy political satire. The plays sparkle with a freshness and energy that comes from a constant attention to detail and a powerful emphasis on the visual and physical elements of drama, dance, music and astonishing rice paper costumes.

Watching T'ae-Sok's historical tragedy, Tae, at the Korean National Theatre I was astonished to find myself in an audience full of teenagers and students rather than fully paid-up Seoul sophisticates. The draw for young audiences is not simply one of cultural status, but a result of the playwright's extreme respect for the role of the audience. T'ae-Sok sat at the back of the auditorium and meticulously noted reactions to the show, and then had a discussion with the audience about changes that could be made to the production. He does this every night and the play changes every day. For T'ae Sok, such humility is core to his working methods. "There should always be space for the audience to control the show," he says.

The forthcoming production of the play Tae is extraordinary, not only because it is the first performance of T'ae-Sok's work in London but also because it is not directed by him, something almost unheard of in Korea. "I don't think that I have achieved the goal I expect myself to achieve as a writer so I haven't felt confident to give the work to someone else," he says. In truth the reason is more likely to be nerves on the part of other directors in the face of his formidable reputation - producing such a show in Seoul would be akin to showing a radical reworking of Mother Courage to Brecht in person.

Gina Lee, the brave director of the London show, has permission from T'ae-Sok to do as she will. But his decision to come to London six months afterwards, risking both Ned Sherrin exposure and the not very foreign-language-friendly tendencies of London audiences, suggests a desire to set the record straight on his own important contribution to international theatre. Not quite the humble manoeuvre one might expect from the ever modest Oh T'ae-Sok.