Lonely rising moon of Na San Man

 

 

Lonely rising moon of Na San Man

 

<Theatre & Life>

 

She was older than San Man and their parents were against of their marriage. She called him a sun, and herself – his moon. She died and now San Man sees her on the night sky only at every full moon time.

 

This story besides sufferings brought to Mr. Na San Man a terrific success in his own country, South Korea. The autobiographical novel “Lonely rising moon” became a bestseller, four volumes of this book were issued in 1.1 million copies. There is a TV drama based on the book story and the audience floods channel office with letters, asking to continue “Lonely rising moon”. San Man should have agreed, but… He calmly said that the book is over and he has got a lot of other things to do.

 

He was born in a rural family. We don’t know what it means in South Korea, but it is known that his parents were against of his decision to dedicate his life to the arts. However, he became a producer and got his own theater. At the same time he was teaching and working with actors. Na San Man has students who already have their own students.

San Man succeeded this all in 34 years. Despite of extraordinary personality of the Korean producer and writer, we would not have known about him if Na San Man did not come to Moscow. And he also followed a fate of many great people: he started working on something that he was not planning on.

He was going to just study Stanislavsky’s system on-site – there was an idea to accomplish theoretical work on “Comparison of Stanislavsky and Grotovsky’s systems with the Korean system in the process of developing an actor”. However, it seems that the Russian land has some quality to encourage different kinds of grandiose ideas and projects. Though, Na San Man, unlike many, started to realize his projects very fast. By his initiative it was decided to found a theater award named after Stanislavsky.

The award will be granted every year on a Theatre day, March 27, for the best producing work, best male and female role, as well as two best debuts. The award’s amount is 600 USD. The best play will go to South Korea for a tour.

Na San Man is also going to form a group of Korean actors and teach them on a base of synthetic program of Grotovsky-Stanislavsky and, of course, Korean methods. Na San Man’s novel “Lonely rising moon” and a play “We are united” are being translated into Russian, which Na San Man is going to produce on the Russian stage.

 

Na San Man does not like politics. He has participated at the political life of his country only once, but in an indirect way by producing a play “We are united”, a play with pacifist inspiration where San Man could bring fighting actors together and reconcile them. Na San Man believes that exactly this performance is necessary to our theater and the audience.

 

I refrained myself from asking the stupidest Russian question to a person who is trying to do something for our country: Why are you doing it? Stopping to ask this kind of questions is the only thing we can do for them for now. Or maybe Na San Man, coming outside on the balcony of his Moscow apartment at the every full moon time, sees that there is the same rising moon – also lonely…

 

Nikolai Fokht