SEOUL – The world’s most unlikely song and dance show opened in Seoul last night, a musical featuring goosestepping soldiers and starving prisoners described as a concentration camp version of “Les Miserables.”

“Yoduk Story” is set in one of North Korea’s most infamous political labor camps, where tens of thousands of families who have fallen foul of the leadership are sent to live and, in many cases, die.

Its director, Jung Sung-san, defected from North Korea in the 1990s and wrote the musical to make artistic sense of his father’s death there – and to alert South Koreans to the fate of their “invisible cousins” over the border.

“This is my commitment to my father, who died, and to myself,” he told a press conference, flanked by his South Korean cast, some dressed as officers, others in rags.

The plot is loosely based on real incidents related by former inmates of Yoduk Re-education Camp 15, the biggest in North Korea’s extensive gulag.

It retails the fate of a leading state troupe dancer, sent to Yoduk with her family after her father, a leading official, is accused of spying. There she is raped by the prison governor and has his baby in a harrowing scene in which inmates belt out patriotic songs to cover the screams of childbirth.

Sex is banned in the camps and women who become pregnant are often punished, and their babies killed.

The score mixes western musical type numbers with pastiches of North Korea’s stylized propaganda routines.

The heroine’s first song is “How precious is my country – I’m singing a song for the general”. The guards sing back “You are just like germs.”

Apart from Mr. Jung, only one other North Korean was directly involved in the production – Kim Young-sun, who before she defected was a leading state choreographer.

She was sent to the camp with her children, but does not know why. Her son was shot trying to escape and her parents died there. She does not know if her husband is alive.

Mr. Jung, whose father worked for the company that imported the leadership’s Mercedes cars, said he never thought of himself as a political figure. He only fled the country when he was jailed for listening to South Korean radio broadcasts, a common crime. He ran away when the prison lorry overturned, and fled to South Korea via China.

Everything changed when he learned his father had been shot because of his escape and a subsequent play he wrote featuring a defector. “I want people, especially the South Koreans, to know this is not a fictional story,” he said. “This is happening a few hours’ drive from here.” Although the gulag is occasionally reported in America and by human rights bodies, it receives little publicity in South Korea.

When allegations of mass incarcerations and deaths appeared, the South was emerging from a painful dictatorship.

But when thousands of refugees arrived with tales of rape, public executions, and infanticide, attention was focused on improving political relations between the two Koreas.

“This may be gradually changing,” another defector, Kang Chol-hwan, who was sent to the camp at the age of nine, said. He worked burying the camp’s dead while living off rats and cornmeal. “But young people particularly still have this idealized portrait of North Korea.”

Mr. Kang’s memoir of his childhood in Yoduk and eventual escape to South Korea, “Aquariums of Pyongyang,” was published in Britain last month.

It describes his shock at encountering indifference in the South and suggestions that he was a propaganda stooge.

Mr. Jung says he was pressurized by South Korean officials to tone down his play and backers withdrew funding. He pledged a kidney as collateral for a loan, before a Norwegian human rights organization stepped in to help.