Interviewer: Tell me how you came to choose Getting Married?
Philippe: Well that' s back to Typhoon really. When I read plays for the Typhoon festival, I read all kinds of plays. It goes from theatre journals to translation by academics to Phd students etc and some of them published in America or here or scripts sent to us directly by the writers, and then... We do a shortlist, and from that shortlist we eventually produce a programme, and Getting Married was one of the plays that was selected in the Typhoon festival and I happened to direct it at that time purely by chance really. We allocate various directors to various plays and I did this one. So this year when we decided to do this double bill of Getting Married and Dogs, it seemed almost natural that, having done the play reading, that I should now have the opportunity to direct it as a full production as it were. I also have a particular fondness for the text. I think it' s a lovely little text. I think that you can look at it superficially and say that' s a very light play about a man falling in love with a woman, there' s few weird happenings, and it' s a bit strange but not much to it. But I think that would not do justice to the piece, there' s a lot of subtlety, and a lot of things that are unsaid, or are said... are metaphorical. And I heard a couple of people discussing it and I heard, ' oh but it' s sweet' , ' but it' s a bit light' . And I feel that if you feel it' s a bit light, it' s because you haven' t really listened to it properly because I think it' s deceptively light because underneath it all the subject it deals with is vital. It' s about life, it' s about seize the day, it' s about the transiency of everything, life, our possessions, and it' s a gently critic of materialism because the swindler says at one point ' my love was distracted by possessions, shoes, ties, houses, but now that everything has been removed it flows directly to you' and I think that that' s an interesting sentence and if you put it back into the context of Korea in the seventies, South Korea in the seventies, I' m sure it is also very potent, as a country blossoming, developing a very materialistic consumerism. So I think it' s got a valid point that will speak to most people if you listen to it carefully.
