It takes a total of eight months to complete a British royal family wedding dress. The dress is worn for only a few hours on the wedding day, but the labor required to make that single gown amounts to 9,057 hours. Yet the spotlight usually falls not on the workers in the back of the atelier, but on the princess who appears under dazzling lights in the finished dress. The play "Lacrima" follows the anonymous hands behind the workshop that created this beautiful garment.

This production by The National Theatre of Strasbourg will have its Korean premiere in October at the Seongnam Arts Center Opera House. The story begins when an order from the British royal family arrives at a historic haute couture house on Paris's Rue Saint-Honoré. Under extreme security, the dress is completed through ateliers in Paris, a lace workshop in Alençon, France, and an embroidery workshop in Mumbai, India. Being part of the project is a once-in-a-lifetime privilege for many, but tight deadlines, long hours, and nondisclosure agreements push the workers to the limit.

The play opens with a character collapsing because of the dress. As the curtain rises, Marion, the chief seamstress at the Paris workshop, staggers into the atelier late at night, and paramedics soon rush in. After this prologue, the story rewinds to the moment the dress was first ordered, tracing how a single garment drives people to the brink. As time accumulates for the seamstresses making the veil in Alençon and the elderly embroiderer attaching pearls in Mumbai, their own stories begin to surface one by one, including domestic violence, depression, and long-buried family secrets.

The title "Lacrima" comes from the Latin word for tears. The work places the beauty of the dress as it takes shape alongside the pain and tears of the people who make it, raising questions about beauty and its cost. This performance is being presented exclusively by the Seongnam Cultural Foundation to mark the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France. It will run for two days only, from October 2 to 3, at the Seongnam Arts Center Opera House, with a 175-minute runtime and no intermission.

[Gu Jeong-geun]

This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.