When Nakkiah Lui won both the Australia Council’s Dreaming award and Belvoir’s Balnaves Indigenous playwright award in 2012, there was a swarm of media attention around the newly crowned sweetheart of Australian theatre.
It didn’t take her long, however, to notice that she was being described in a particular way. Terms like Indigenous leader or urban Aboriginal were used repeatedly and photographers would often pose her against a graffiti-covered brick wall. “I’d always get the same direction: ‘Look like you are dreaming’, ‘Look up into the sky’,” she says.
The stereotype rankled. “I’m not just this fair skinned Aboriginal person talking about political issues who’s ‘done good’,” says Lui. “To me that always seems like: ‘What are you saying about the rest of Indigenous Australia?’ I don’t like the word leader, especially when used about me. I wanted to be seen as a person.”
Instead she took to Twitter, with a steady stream of hilarious, no-holds-barred tweets. “[There weren’t] any black women on social media who talked about sex and dating and politics and more subversive experiences of racism.” she says. “I can use this to create a space for myself that I won’t get anywhere else.”
Breaking the rules is what Lui likes best. Blak Cabaret, the campy musical satire she penned for Malthouse and which just premiered at Sydney festival, stars performance artist Constantina Bush (Kamahi Djordon King) as an Indigenous queen invading a terra nullius and claiming it as her own, never mind its white inhabitants. The all-singing, all-dancing cabaret show inverts Australian history with thought-provoking results.
When we speak, Lui is in rehearsals for her latest Belvoir commission, Kill the Messenger. Based on real events, the play tells of Lui’s grandmother who died after falling through the floor of her house. It’s about “the lives that are lost because of racist bureaucratic decisions,” she explains. And “what a beast that bureaucracy is”.
She stars in the show – as herself, albeit a fictionalised version – and had to audition for the role. “The big note from the director was ‘trust the words’. I was like, yeah, I know the person who wrote the word,” she says with a laugh. “I thought: they’ll probably give it to Miranda Tapsell.”
The play is deeply personal for a writer who has described herself as a proud Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. “It’s about telling Aboriginal stories. Why do we tell them? What’s the importance of them? What is the relationship between black and white Australia today and how complicit are we all?” The play’s form is also deliberately unusual.
“I’ve tried to destroy theatre,” she announces. “Everything I use that is at all theatrical, I can only use if I then break it and destroy it and turn it on its head. So in the play you never know what’s true and what’s not. I didn’t want anyone to be able to say this is just a story.”
Or that it couldn’t be funny: “I really wanted people to think [and] humour does that because it lets people in. It gets them to laugh, which is so visceral and then the thoughts linger.”
Lui wants to be challenged by her work as much as her audience – “What’s the point of doing the same thing all the time?” – and has lent both her writing and acting talents to the critically acclaimed ABC sketch show Black Comedy. The program has been praised for pushing the boundaries of Indigenous comedy and Lui agrees: “I definitely think – well, I hope – Black Comedy is going to change the way Indigenous work is told and how it’s perceived. It was daring just by the nature of it.”
For all her cheeky outspokenness, it’s clear Lui feels a sense of responsibility in her work. “Maybe I won’t see things change in my time but at least there will be a document to say that, at this point, these people were talking about this and these people cared. That might make a difference later down the track.”
She’d also like to believe stories help people to connect. “Being in someone else’s world and feeling things you may not get to feel in real life, to laugh and to escape and to dream, and the hope that feeling gives you for a moment – I like that I can do that for people.”
Blak Cabaret opens at Malthouse, Melbourne on 10 February. Kill the Messenger opens at Belvoir, Sydney on 14 February
