Why did Olivier Award winner Jethro Compton turn down Hollywood for Korean zombie musical?

A year after his work The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won the 2025 Laurence Olivier Award for best new musical, Jethro Compton has big Hollywood studios calling to ask for meetings. He declines them all. Instead, the British writer and director is working as dramaturge on an English adaptation of The Last Man, a South Korean one-person zombie musical set in a tiny bunker – and the last project most people would expect from the hottest name in West End theatre. “I’m saying, ‘No, no, I’m busy right now. I’m in Korea.’ I’ll come back to them at some point, but right now, this feels very exciting to me,” Compton says. It is a surprising priority, though Compton does not see it that way. “I’m not very interested in my career,” he says. “I’m interested in doing things that excite me and challenge me and having new experiences and working with interesting people on interesting shows … I often will turn down projects that are probably a good career choice. “My heart needs to connect with something, otherwise I just can’t find a way to feel passionate about it.” Compton joined The Last Man after being introduced to Lee Hyun-jae, of the musical’s production company NEO, by Jung In-suk of IM Culture, which first brought Compton’s The Frontier Trilogy plays to Korea. NEO had been looking for a British collaborator who could help shepherd a Korean musical into a full UK production without losing its identity. Written by Kim Ji-shik, with music by Kwon Seung-yeon and directed by Kim Dal-jung, The Last Man began as a web musical in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic before evolving into a fully fledged stage production. Set in bunker B-103 in Seoul’s Sillim-dong neighbourhood, it follows the lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse. Since its Korean premiere, the show has staged readings in New York and Tokyo, and a licensed Chinese production opened in Shanghai in August 2025. The London run at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, from May 8 to June 6, will mark its first full-scale English production. What drew Compton in was not just the genre premise, but the inner life of the person in the bunker. “I resonated, connected with the script and the concept of The Last Man, of needing to self-isolate from the world sometimes and lock oneself away. I identified with the character,” he says. Although the production is marketed as a zombie musical, Compton is more interested in the show’s complex layers than its horror trappings. “Obviously, it’s advertised as a zombie musical, but I’m always interested in stories when they have different layers of reality or different things happening at the same time that can be interpreted in two different ways by an audience,” he says. “Without giving too much away for audiences who haven’t seen it, I think it’s that layer of what you see versus what might be real, and how you, as an audience member, choose to interpret that is very interesting.” In the original Korean staging, those questions played out through multiple actors alternating in the central role, regardless of gender. Each performer brought a different temperament to the “last man”, creating slightly different survivors in the same bunker. The UK audition also opened the door to actors of all genders, and Compton says that the London production will retain that spirit but shape it for British audiences. “We’re not limiting it by gender. We’re looking for the best people [to play the role],” he says, adding that two actors will share the part in London. “We are figuring out how to do that in a way that keeps that aspect of the Korean production but also best demonstrates the Korean societal pressures in a way that a British audience can understand. They will not be the same character played by two different actors. It will be two different characters.” As dramaturge, Compton works on the script and structure with the original creative team to translate and adapt so that the piece lands with British audiences. One of his non-negotiables is that The Last Man remains recognisably Korean. “It is remaining a Korean-set show and the character will be Korean, the story will be Korean … So it’s figuring out how to communicate that to a British audience without it feeling like a TED Talk about Korean society.” At the same time, Compton sees the emotional core of the story as widely relatable. “Most of the story and the ideas behind the show, to me, feel quite universal. I think the challenges and pressures that society puts on individuals, as a wider societal issue but also within families, are quite a universal issue,” he says. However, the one element Compton still finds difficult to translate is Sillim-dong itself, the neighbourhood where bunker B-103 is supposedly located. The area is known as a hub for students preparing for high-level civil service and judicial exams. It is lined with cram schools, dormitories and advertising promising academic and career success. “I also didn’t really understand myself until I went to Sillim-dong last week. It felt like there was a marketing propaganda in that area of, ‘If you come here, you will succeed. You must study hard, you will be brilliant and you will have a very successful life,’” he says. “That sort of pressure for people, for students particularly, in that area, that’s something that I thought was quite unique. It helped me understand why the setting of Sillim-dong is so important to this story and to the character. And that’s a very complicated thing to try to explain to an audience within a play, so I haven’t figured that one out yet.” Over four visits to Seoul across the past decade, Compton has seen how Korean and British audiences differ in what they expect from a show. He has brought his own work to Korean stages before, but this time he is helping a Korean production find its footing in the UK. “This is the first time that I’m trying to work in the other direction, and it’s been really fascinating. My main focus has been how to make it meet the needs of a UK audience without losing sight of what makes it special for its Korean audience, and trying to always stay very true to the vision that the team here have, while also needing to make those changes that mean a British audience will react the way we want them to react,” he says. Compton also revealed that his Olivier Award-winning musical Benjamin Button is now headed for Korea. “It will be playing in Seoul next year,” he says. “It’s going to be a new Korean production with Korean actors in Korean. We’re working on that at the moment.” Read the full story at The Korea Times.

Why did Olivier Award winner Jethro Compton turn down Hollywood for Korean zombie musical?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Jethro Compton shares why his choice to adapt musical The Last Man for UK viewers is about ‘experiences’ rather than advancing his career

Jethro Compton shares why his choice to adapt musical The Last Man for UK viewers is about ‘experiences’ rather than advancing his career