Swag Age

With echoes of Les Mis, Bat Out Of Hell and We Will Rock You, Korean musical Swag Age arrived in London for one night only.

In an imagined Joseon (a period of the country’s history roughly between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries), the celebrated national art form of sijo (poetry) has been banned and its performers threatened with prison or worse. Into the fray comes a motley crew of masked outlaws called the Golbin Gang. Risking their life and their liberty, these are young rebels with a cause, namely to return sijo from its government-imposed exile.

Bouncy slabs of K-Pop are no strangers to UK radio stations and Netflix’s Squid Games was a hit worldwide during the pandemic. As Swag Age shows, Korean musicals are, though, more of an acquired taste.

With the songbook and dialogue all in Korean, an English version of both are provided on screens either side of the stage. The usual up-down eyeball ping-pong action in opera houses is replaced by slightly less tiring left-right movements as we attempt to keep up with a fast moving story. Staging is plain and consists mostly of three small wooden platforms. There are plot holes you could drive a bus through (how does a small band of penniless singers have an effect across the nation?) and, going by the audience reactions, the original text loses a fair amount of humour and emotion in translation.

Despite all that, director Lee Kyung-soo digs deep into the core themes and relationships helped by a stellar performance from Yang Hee Jun as the iconoclastic sijo singer Dan. A father-daughter duet pulls good and hard at the heartstrings, the main villain (Lim Hyun Soo) couldn’t be any more villainous and we get behind our band of misfit heroes early on. Choreographer Kim Eun-chong makes sublime use of the huge stage, filling it with snappy ensemble numbers as well as more tender pieces.

The lighting design from Lee Woo Hyun is a winner here, effectively taking us from the street scenes to the inner royal chambers and the palace oubliette with subtle shading and stark borders. The fruity script from Park Chan-min (if you ever wondered what the Korean for “bastard” and “wanker” was, this is your chance) struggles to demonstrate how the eloquence of sijo to a Western audience compares to, for example, a haiku or sonnet but still contains enough comedic gems to give this work a certain swagger.