5 Questions with Kim Ho, on 'The Great Australian Play'
An ingenious new satire from Patrick White Award-winning playwright Kim Ho, The Great Australian Play is a psychedelic romp through the myths of our glorious nation’s past, present and imagined future.
Featuring vanishing conmen, Nazi German dingo scalpers and an ancient evil force, this is the dazzling epic we’ve been waiting for.
Photo / Jack Dixon-Gunn
No. 1
How did The Great Australian Play come about?
In 2018, I undertook a Masters of Writing for Performance at the VCA. I really wanted my major work to be an Important Play, that Really Said Something About Our Contemporary Moment. I stumbled onto the legend of Lasseter’s Reef: in 1930, a guy called Harold Bell Lasseter convinced the nation he’d found a “reef of gold” in the outback. Unsurprisingly, the expedition to find the reef soon turned into a nightmare. I had the uncanny feeling like I’d known this story my whole life. I decided I’d use that as a basis for the play.
It became clear really quickly that the Lasseter legend just didn’t suit theatre at all. It was a very cinematic story, and also a very colonial one: eight white men questing for King and Country. The more I tried to wrangle it into a play, the more lost I became. I realised that my foolish search for “creative gold” in the historical material mirrored the explorers’ search for the reef.
So I decided to just blow the thing apart and tell a meta-story: five screenwriters venture out into the desert to retrace the expedition’s footsteps, trying to write a Lasseter screenplay. As their journey, too, descends into a nightmare, questions arise about what stories we tell, how we tell them and what they say about us—for better or worse.
I found that by liberating myself from the pressure to be important, I was able to find new paths into critiquing colonial Australian mythology.
No.2
Who are you working with to create The Great Australian Play?
The show’s being produced by Montague Basement, which is Imogen Gardam, our producer, and Saro Lusty-Cavallari, our director. Saro directed an early reading of the play and we just clicked—he has an amazing dramaturgical eye and an equally twisted sense of humour.
From the outset we wanted a majority non-white, majority female cast; it happened to also be majority Asian! The idea was to usurp this very colonial story, using the bodies and voices of people who had been excluded from those narratives.
We’re working with Tamara Lee Bailey, Daniel Fischer, Sarah Fitzgerald, Jessa Koncic and Sermsah (Suri) bin Saad. It’s been an absolute dream watching them find and push the surrealism, humour, pathos and ugliness in their characters.
No.3
Tracing what seems like a very common desire for a singular narrative, the title seems plays with/splits apart the term ‘the Great American Novel’.
I think Australia’s national identity is deeply muddled. Not only are we ashamed of or in denial about colonisation and Indigenous sovereignty, we’re also clinging to the notion that Australia is a Western country rather than part of Asia.
I think this denial is what drives novelists and playwrights and screenwriters to fabricate a singular narrative of our history. But any attempt at colonial Australian mythology is so empty, because it’s based on genocide and the lie of Terra Nullius.
We have such an antagonistic relationship with the Ancient, so I think there’s a profoundly fearful vein in our mythology.
What I’m trying to do with The Great Australian Play is point out the impossibility of creating a unified narrative of Australia as a non-Indigenous Australian, the folly of suggesting there can be a “great” story from a country that is, let’s face it, not great itself.
No.4
You’ve said previously that the ‘tone and style of the play might best be described as Heart of Darkness meets Priscilla: Queen of the Desert’, which is a wild and wonderful collaboration— tell us more!
I’m quite a cerebral writer, so part of my process in letting go of the “well-made play” was to deliberately bypass my tendency to think everything through, and instead try to tap into my subconscious. I wrote a series of vignettes that were only tangentially related to the Lasseter legend, and wove them through the play. These vignettes have a really Lynchian vibe to them. To me, they feel like we’re entering this nightmarescape where the worst aspects of colonial Australian culture lurk.
At the same time, because my characters are screenwriters, the play is peppered with Australian pop culture references and general Australiana. It’s very clear this story is unfolding against a tapestry of monolithic texts – Picnic at Hanging Rock, Priscilla, Wake in Fright, The Babadook, Red Dog, Tracks with Mia Wasikowska…
No.5
What kinds of conversations are you hoping to open up with ‘The Great Australian Play’?
There’s this apocryphal quote incorrectly attributed to Napoleon that goes something like, “History is only an agreed upon myth.”
I’d like this show to offer the audience some ways to become more critical about the myths that constitute Australia’s national story and identity.
I’m also really interested in continuing the conversation about how to avoid performative allyship – particularly in the performing arts – how to combine arts with activism to make the cultural change we desperately need.
Ultimately, I’d like to create a space where we can confront the ugliness of Australia’s past together. I think we need more spaces like that if we’re to become a fairer, better nation.
Find out more
Kim Ho (@maybekimho) is a writer, performer and dramaturg based in Naarm. His play Mirror’s Edge won the Patrick White Playwright’s Award and received readings at Melbourne Theatre Company and Dark Matter Theatrics in Singapore. His recent work Buried Kingdom was part of the Typhoon Festival in London, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. In 2020, Kim will undertake a writing residency with Cambodian Living Arts in Phnom Penh.
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