Critics Name Top 3 Korean Plays of 2025: 'Sammegyeong', 'Gulliver: Zoom In-Out', and 'Mukti'
Creatrip Team
3 months ago
The Korean Theatre Critics Association selected three standout productions as the 2025 Best 3: National Theater’s Sammegyeong (reworking of the 1991 play Dongsung), Hatangse’s Gulliver Travel: Zoom In-Out (an experimental take on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver), and Dong Company’s Mukti (invoking the spirits of migrant workers and refugees). Critics praised Sammegyeong for creatively expanding and amplifying its source material through Buddhist themes; Gulliver for playfully upending habitual perceptions of size and subject–object relations through layered stagecraft; and Mukti for summoning the souls of foreign deceased (including migrant workers, undocumented residents, and marriage migrants) to probe deep social problems with poetic dialogue and restrained physical performance. Separately, the performance-and-theory group awarded the 2025 “Work of the Year” to End Wall, a poetic retelling of a 2021 industrial fatality, and named director Lee Cheol-hee “Theatre Person of the Year” for provocative re-creations of classics. The awards ceremony is set for Jan 10 in Daehangno (a Seoul theatre district).
