JIMIN CHOI

In an age as noisy as ours, it feels worth pausing to ask what we mean when we talk about adaptation. Moving a story from one medium to another isn’t just a matter of translation -- it’s a question of necessity. Why did Joe Wright decide that Pride and Prejudice needed to be a film? Why did Hugo’s Les Misérables have to become a musical? Each successful adaptation carries with it a reason for being. A new emotional language, a new way of seeing. That, to me, is the heart of adaptation: transformation that clarifies rather than repeats.

I went into PAGE1’s Pagwa (based on Gu Byeong-mo’s novel) without reading the source material (a true blessing for someone who avoids spoilers like the plague -- I always hope to meet a story on its own terms). But soon after the curtain rose, I realised I hadn’t left the novel behind at all. It was standing there, like a ghost, looming over the performers on stage.

Narration slipped in and out so often and so insistently that it never stopped reminding us of the book’s presence. Rather than disappearing into its new form, Pagwa kept turning back toward its origin, whispering, I am an adaptation; remember where I came from. It was as if the musical itself wasn’t convinced it had the right to exist without the novel’s permission.

Ultimately, the piece often felt like a novel wearing a musical’s skin. The score, staging, and dialogue all hinted at a wish to find independence, but the storytelling never quite let go of prose.

When an adaptation succeeds as Les Misérables did, we might leave the theatre wanting to revisit the source, not out of confusion, but curiosity: to colour the world we’ve just seen. Pagwa, however, left me wondering about the basics instead. Wait, why did she do that? What did that mean? Until finally: perhaps I should just read the book. And the moment that thought crossed my mind, the musical had already been consumed whole by its source material.

Still, there are moments when Pagwa reaches toward something uniquely theatrical. A song introducing the protagonists’ workplace (a contract-killing company described as “everywhere and nowhere”) hints at a smart paradox. But the scene, with its bright parkas and upbeat choreography, leans too cheerfully into the “everywhere”, leaving the “nowhere” adrift. You can sense the concept; you just wish it would push harder, risk more, turn the volume up until conviction replaces cleverness.

Elsewhere, flashes of style (laser beams and Matrix-like slow motion) seem to gesture toward the surreal but never quite find their rhythm. Perhaps this is the limit of scale, or simply the tension between ambition and means. Either way, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for the production: the ideas are sincere, even if the textures don’t hold.

And beneath it all lies the lingering question every adaptation must answer: why now, and why like this?

Is Pagwa about regret, rebirth, obsession, or the quiet gravity of death? Maybe all of these. But distilling the breadth of Gu Byeong-mo’s novel into two and a half hours feels less like compression rather than collision, as if the story itself is bursting at the seams of its new costume.

There’s an image that lingers after leaving the theatre: a child standing in front of a mirror, swimming in an oversized suit. The desire to grow into something grand is touching, even admirable, but sometimes the fabric simply doesn’t fit. And what remains, when the effort outweighs the transformation, is what the title gently foretells: Pagwa, a bruised fruit -- imperfect, human, and quietly breaking under its own weight.