Running time: 100 minutes
Dates: Saturday, 4 April 2026 – Sunday, 21 June 2026
Venue: Yes24 Art One Hall 2
Cast: Kim Yeo-jin, Woo Jeong-won, Kim Jeong / Jeon Seong-woo, Lee Jae-gyun, Moon Yu-gang
Mouthpiece is the production that changed the way I look at theatre. What made it so remarkable wasn't simply that it was entertaining or polished — it was that it left me with questions I couldn't answer long after the curtain came down. The work keeps its audience in a state of constant reflection, circling the themes of art and ethics, creation and representation, and the accessibility of culture and the arts.
What struck me most as I watched was the way the boundary between reality and fiction kept dissolving. In the play, Libby draws on Declan's life as the raw material for her writing and her performance. But at a certain point it becomes genuinely difficult to tell where Declan's reality ends and Libby's interpretation begins. Was it the moment she started mimicking his speech and expressions? The moment the two of them clashed over how the story should end? Or the final scene, when they meet again in the theatre? I even found myself wondering whether the entire story we were watching might already be Libby's creation. That ambiguity is not merely a dramatic device — it lays bare the inevitable distortions and acts of interpretation that arise whenever someone's life is transposed into art.
The work shows that art has the power to give voice to the socially vulnerable and the marginalised. At the same time, it pointedly reminds us that the process of doing so is not always ethical. When a real person's life is reshaped for dramatic effect, are we truly understanding that person — or are we consuming them? The audience is moved and moved to empathy by Declan's story, yet there is an undercurrent of unease: might that very emotion have been manufactured from someone else's pain? And so, while the work acknowledges that art can serve as a vehicle for social messages, it refuses to look away from the power dynamics and the objectification that can emerge along the way.
The question of access to culture and the arts also left a deep impression on me. We say that art should be open to everyone, yet in reality economic, social, and geographic barriers persist. The play raises the concern that art must not become the exclusive property of a particular class, and it invites us to think about what a truly inclusive art might look like. This goes beyond the simple matter of who gets a ticket — it leads to the question of who gets to be the subject of a story, and who gets to use art as a means of making their voice heard.
Above all, it was the final scene that stayed with me. Libby's story ends in a blackout, but Declan's life does not. The story on stage has taken its bow, yet the life of the person it was drawn from goes on. That moment reminds us that art can never fully contain reality, while at the same time asking us to consider how we ought to regard the people who exist beyond the stage. The line in the play — "Watching a performance is about the heartbeats of the audience falling into sync" — captures the essence of theatre better than anything else. Performance is an art form that brings different people together in a shared space to experience a single story and find common feeling in it. And <Mouthpiece> asks where that feeling begins, and how far it should be allowed to go. That is why this production is both my favourite piece of theatre and the turning point that first made me think seriously about the meaningful questions art can pose to society.
