‘Sea of Blood’: The acclaimed opera written by a North Korean dictator in 1971
The difference between tragedy and comedy is distance. Reading about life under a dictator sounds hilarious on the surface, but then you remember the very real stakes involved, and you see just how frightening everyday life under them is for normal people.
Sure, we can giggle at the overt displays of histrionic grief that greet the passing of a dictator. However, it’s always worth remembering that people are throwing themselves to the floor and wailing like banshees because if they don’t look heartbroken enough, they die. Simple as that. You’d do the same if put in their Kafka-esque nightmare of a life, and probably get pretty good at faking admiration for someone when you spend your entire life doing so.
It is an entire societal structure that doesn’t just have one person at the top like a monarchy. Instead, it’s a societal structure where one person is, essentially, God. It’s not just that whatever the dictator says goes, it’s that literally everything they do, every whim they feel is perfect. Imagine if King Canute had forced members of his court to get into the sea and make the waves obey his command. A pretty funny mental image until you consider the number of people who drowned.
That really has been life under the Kim dynasty in North Korea since Kim Il Sung founded the country in 1948. Loyalty wasn’t enough. Respect wasn’t enough. Love wasn’t enough. Kim Il Sung wanted the entire country to be obsessed with his every move. Whether that was demonstrating their love for him every time he blessed their lives with his presence or something even more bafflingly strange.
Forcing the entire country to sit through his opera.
North Korea’s dictator really wrote an opera?
Nope, he didn’t write an opera. He wrote several, at least according to the dogma of the North Korean government. If you can believe it, they were also masterpieces. Clearly, the eternal president was as talented a librettist as his son was a golfer. Though I’m sure that both of them would be as good at both pastimes if they wanted to be. One of Kim Il Sung’s operas stood out, if it were possible for masterpieces to stand out among masterpieces, and became one of the great works of North Korean culture. At least if you ask their government.
Sea of Blood is the story of a noble Korean family living under the brutal Japanese occupation of the 1930s. The protagonist, Sun-Nyo and her children suffer numerous hardships at the hands of the Japanese until she can take it no more, and takes the fight to them as part of the glorious Communist revolution. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss indeed. First performed in 1971, Sea of Blood was an instant hit, as if it could be anything else.
It’s gone on to become the most performed work in the history of North Korean theatre, staged over 1,500 times and performed all over the world. Shockingly enough, anyone who’s ever seen the show and written about it officially concurs that it’s a masterpiece. I’m sure the fact that they had the North Korean government breathing down their neck the whole time had absolutely no effect on the finished review, just as it had absolutely no effect on the hordes of citizens who flocked to see it at the Pyongyang Grand Theatre.
Again, very funny. Until you remember the stakes at hand. People will do anything to stay alive, so in the grand scheme of things, saying that an opera is a masterpiece is a small price to pay.