🎠Before the Nobel: An Italian Director’s Three Years With Han Kang’s Texts — Woody Magazine, May 21, 2026
This summer, the Festival d'Avignon has chosen Korean as its Invited Language — a first for any Asian language and for any single nation in the program's short history. The official IN program lists nine Korean works. One of them stands a little apart: a stage adaptation by an Italian director whose name is almost entirely unknown in South Korea. Daria Deflorian, a veteran actress and director who has spent some twenty-five years on Italian stages, will premiere her new production Che dolore terribile è l'amore — based on Han Kang's novel We Do Not Part — in Avignon on July 13. The festival will also host a separate reading performance featuring Han Kang in person. Next to the author's official appearance, Deflorian's work is easy to overlook. The work beside it, however, has a longer history than its place on the program suggests.
This is not Deflorian's first encounter with Han Kang. In 2023 she staged Elogio della vita a rovescio, a short theatre study centered on the sister's perspective in Han Kang's The Vegetarian. In autumn 2024 she premiered a full adaptation of the same novel under the title La vegetariana. Che dolore terribile è l'amore is the third work in that quiet sequence.
The chronology changes how the work reads. Han Kang's texts did not arrive on European stages in the wake of the Nobel; Deflorian had been moving them onto those stages, slowly, well before the announcement in Stockholm. The prize sits on top of a current that was already flowing. Her reason for choosing We Do Not Part is captured in a single phrase in the festival's official notes — a refusal she shares with Han Kang, "the refusal to reduce tragedies to the bare names of cities and the count of the dead." The novel returns to the winter of 1948 on Jeju Island, when a civilian massacre — officially counted in the tens of thousands — unfolded during the suppression of the Jeju Uprising. Deflorian's question is what survives that statistic, and how it might be summoned back onto a stage.
"One day, Gyeong-ha receives a message from her friend In-seon, who lives on Jeju Island, in South Korea. She has apparently injured herself chopping wood and had to be taken back to the mainland. But she had to leave behind a bird that risks starving to death."— From the Festival d'Avignon's official program notes
The question is already there in the program's first sentences. A single bird left behind, in the absence of a person. Deflorian's stage does not begin with the count of the dead but with that one bird. On stage with her are Anna Coppola and Monica Piseddu. The production is led by the Italian company INDEX, with the Festival d'Avignon, théâtre Garonne in Toulouse, and three major Italian institutions — Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and Teatro di Roma — listed as co-producers. There is no Korean producer attached. This is less the export of a Korean work than the absorption of a Korean text into European theatre's own material.
At the same festival, the Cour d'Honneur — the courtyard of the Palais des Papes, where the Avignon Festival was founded in 1947 — will host a reading of the same novel. Isabelle Huppert and Lee Hye-young, the South Korean actor who appeared opposite Huppert in Hong Sang-soo's 2024 film A Traveler's Needs, will read it together. It is rare for a single book to receive two stagings within one festival. The textures of the two, however, are not the same. One is an official event accompanying the author. The other is an independent reading that a foreign director has been developing on her own over the past three years.
What makes this summer at Avignon worth noticing, in the end, is that difference. Beyond the headline of nine Korean works officially invited, the more telling thing is how a Korean text is now finding its place inside the material of artists abroad. Deflorian's new production marks that shift more sharply than any number can.
The Nobel did not carry Han Kang to European stages. An Italian director was already carrying her texts there, quietly, before the prize ever arrived.
- Source ↗ Festival d'Avignon (official) — Che dolore terribile è l'amore program page
- Source ↗ INDEX productions (official) — Avignon premiere date and full production credits (July 13, 2026)
- Source ↗ Editoriale Domani — Deflorian's Han Kang trilogy, Italian critical overview
- Source ↗ Paneacquaculture — Confirmation of Elogio della vita a rovescio 2023 debut
- Source ↗ Hankyung — Nine Korean works officially invited to Avignon 2026 (April 9, 2026)
- Source ↗ SBS News — On We Do Not Part, Jeju Uprising, and the Médicis Prize
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