On the eve of his retirement, Roland receives a festschrift honoring thirty years of academic life — only to realize that the memory which truly changed him is nowhere to be found within its pages. He begins to confide in a student, reaching back forty years to a small university far from Berlin, where he once met an English literature professor named Y. Y's passionate lectures on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage captivated the young Roland from the very first encounter. The two grew close through their shared love of scholarship — yet Roland could never quite determine where that warmth was coming from. Y's manner swung between welcome and rejection without warning, and Roland's own feelings proved just as impossible to name.
Unbenannt is a German word meaning "nameless," "anonymous," or "untitled." The delicate emotional layers that Stefan Zweig built up through adjectives in his novels are transformed by writer Hwang Jungeun into verbs on stage. *Jungeun Hwang not only writes original works but also participates in adaptation projects, just like Unbenannt. Her work spans a wide range of genres, including productions such as the Seoul Arts Center play Hamlet and the National Theater Company of Korea production of Hedda Gabler.
Why you should see it
1. A Stage Filled With the Unspoken
Rather than telling what is felt, it is shown through what is done. Audience with a sensitivity to poetics and linguistics will immediately sense how refined this transformation is. The things left unsaid fill the stage, and each movement carries more than ten times the weight of words. In this work, emotion moves before dialogue does.
At the root of this work lie two kinds of confusion. One arises from the inability to put emotion into words; the other arises from knowing, yet being unable to speak. On the surface they may appear similar, but the two confusions belong to entirely different kinds of pain. If the former is a matter of perception, the latter is a matter of relationship. Unbenannt does not conflate the two — it keeps the distinct textures of each character's emotion separate, all the way to the end.
Faced with emotions that resist naming, we ultimately fall back on enumeration. Is it curiosity, or is it affection? Is it a fascination with youth and passion, or has one simply fallen in love with a person as they are? A feeling that cannot be defined retreats deeper into an ever-lengthening sentence. Because the emotion cannot be pinned down, the words grow longer and at some point, that accumulation of words becomes another language unto itself. Unbenannt brings that enumeration onto the stage.
2. A play disguised as a lecture
Another reason Unbenannt is compelling lies in Y's lecture scene. He is giving a lecture — and yet he is performing.
This is how Elizabethan theatre begins.
*Elizabethan theatre is best represented by William Shakespeare. As the golden age of English drama, this period enjoyed widespread popularity across social classes at venues such as the Globe Theatre. Rather than relying on elaborate stage machinery, Elizabethan plays vividly portrayed human desire and tragedy through poetic and dynamic dialogue.
Rural entertainments, leisure, festivals, street poets, buffoonery, music, and the dynamism of love. The vitality that began there migrates into Y's lecture hall, and then into Y's home. The work rearranges the energy of an age when everything was intermingled, using the most spare and economical of words. The characters pass through storms, become street poets, and trespass into each other's language.Within Y's lecture, the language of drama and the spectacle of emotion coexist at once. Y's class begins like scholarship — but ultimately spills into confession.
3. Genderless Casting
This play is a two-hander, consisting of just two characters: Professor Y and his student. The student becomes "Lotte" when cast as a woman, and "Roland" when cast as a man. And the professor's name remains, at the end, simply Y — the most tension-laden signifier in the play. This narrative, which traces the past through Roland's eyes, takes the form of a retrospective play while operating at the same time like a confession in the present tense. Memory reaches toward the past, but emotion still lingers in the present.
I saw Kim Bo-jeong as Y and Lee Jeong-hwa as Lotte. Having attended on a post-show talk day, I caught a glimpse of how differently the two casts interpret their characters, through a question from an audience member who had seen the show multiple times. This is where the genius of genderless casting lies. The relationship between Y and Roland reads in an entirely different register depending on the gender of the cast.
Lee Jeong-hwa's Lotte is a bright, slightly reckless university student. An admiration and longing for someone further along in life came through naturally. When an audience member asked what she was feeling during the first encounter with Y, Lee listed her answers one by one: warmth, curiosity, freshness, hope, possibility. Feelings that can only be approached through enumeration, not definition. That, perhaps, was the emotional temperature of the moment Lotte first laid eyes on Y.
Kim Bo-jeong's Y, by contrast, was a figure brimming with energy yet shot through with loneliness — someone who seemed already accustomed to solitude. Y is a character of many words, talking ceaselessly in the lecture hall and at home. And yet Kim's Y is someone who, amid all those words, can never quite bring herself to say what she actually means. The irony of the most eloquent person in the room collapsing before an emotion that language cannot reach made Y all the more heartbreaking. By the time feelings long suppressed finally burst out in the form of a confession, it was less a confession than an eruption. This adaptation has trimmed the husband character from the original, reshaping the work into a two-hander — a choice that seems to deepen Y's solitude considerably.
What truly matters rarely survives as a complete sentence. Emotion trembles outside the record, and relationships linger on, unnamed. Unbenannt dwells in that place — where what is left behind still resonates.
The play Unbenannt runs at YES24 Stage Hall 3 until June 7, 2026.
Producer Seungwon Han (한승원), Jongseok Kim (김종석) Adaptor Jungeun Hwang (황정은) Director Eunnim Kim (김은) Composer Hansik Gong (공한식) Technical Director Yushin Kim (김유신) Set Designer Jiin Song (송지인) Props Designer Juyeon Noh (노주연) Sound Designer Juhan Kim (김주한) Sound Effects Jihwi Kwon (권지휘) Lighting Designer Hyunkyu Lee (이현규) Costume Designer Moonki Hong (홍문기) Makeup Designer Sookhee Kim (김숙희) Production Manager Subin Kim (김수빈) Stage Manager Eunjin Jo (조은진) Cast Woojin Hong (홍우진), Bada Kim (김바다), Kangwoo Lee (이강우), Jaewoong Choi (최재웅), Bojung Kim (김보정), Junghwa Lee (이정화)
