“It’s a crazy story,’ says Oh. “The book is a mixture of Gone with the Wind and Baz Luhrman’s Australia. It paints a large canvas. It’s a serious call to arms: if England were invaded by Mongol hordes then Australia would be left defenseless. McKay had quite a detailed plan. He envisioned a railroad line to Point Parker and planned to set aside land in Queensland to protect Australia from imminent invasion.”
Not surprisingly, the book is almost unreadable. This is as much to do the calibre of its writing as its content. “I am one of the few people who have read it cover to cover,” notes Oh. “The tone changes in the novel along the way – it gets sketchier. McKay didn’t know how to finish it. He was in a hurry. Some characters just go missing. The focus is on things he’s interested in, like horses. Everything else is pretty sketchy. McKay had some success with poetry and was friends with Banjo Patterson. He entered NSW parliament and was a member for 35 years. He set up The Light Horse Brigade Unit, a home grown-brigade to knock back the yellow invaders.”
It sounds ludicrous now, but there were real fears in the 19th and early 20th century that the ‘Orientals’ (this referred mostly to Mongolians and Chinese) would take over ‘civilised’ European society, including making their way from Asia Minor to Australia. “Those were the politics of the day,” says Oh. “The term ‘The Yellow Peril’ was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II (of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1890’s. He was a fanatical white supremacist, who in a dream envisaged the Buddha riding a dragon and invading the west. This was in 1895, the same year McKay’s book was published.”
Love and invasion form the themes of The Yellow Wave, subtitled ‘A Romance of the Asian Invasion of Australia’. “It’s a serious piece of Australian invasion science fiction,” explains Oh. “We’re mixing things up, trying to make things more interesting. We worked intensely on theatricalisation, on how to make it fun to watch.” The production enjoys the considerable comedic talents of actors Keith Brockett (The Librarians) and John Marc Desengano, as well as a narration by Andrea McCannon. “We needed a narrator to help create a plot you could follow. There’s a big prologue – it’s ten years before anything happens.”
As well as lampooning fears of ‘the yellow peril’, the production challenges theatrical conventions too, along with outdated ideas of performance. “Two actors play all the characters. We couldn’t do it with white actors,” says Oh. “At the end of day this project is also about diversity in theatre, it’s about ability and plasticity. There are two big lies in theatre – one being that white people can play anything, but the minute you’re not white you’re the maid or the Chinese restaurant owner. There’s that notion of ability versus meritocracy, the perception that if you’re not white, you’re not as good and you’re not as versatile; that you don’t have the skills. In a quiet way we tackle both issues head on. It is one of the drivers of the play. The material is quite racist and this show is the solution – we’ll flush the racists out for you.”
Brockett and Desengano play 20 different characters between them. “There’s a range of accents, a range of characters, white Australian and everything in between, both male and female,” says Oh. Belying racist traditions in performance and confounding audience expectations regarding casting come secondary to entertainment, however. “The show is a comedy at the end of day. A lot of the time it’s a fun, enjoyable piece of theatre,” he says. “It’s playful, with a lot of diversity. The boys get away with murder. The two boys play a whole bunch of female characters.” Needless to say, female characters in the source material were one-dimensional at best. Does The Yellow Wave feature a Suzy Wong in a cheongsam? “No, but there’s a Commissioner Wang, beautifully played by Keith, leading the invading horde,” Oh replies. “And it does get a little queer. The production is a love letter to the actors. Keith and John have got that rhythm; theirs are balanced, warm performances. So much of this is about the performance.”
Previous collaborations by Oh and Miller include Mein Kampf, Mother8888er and Cuckoo. Has The Yellow Wave asked anything especially new of Oh as a director? “I don’t think my directorial style changes from piece to piece. At heart it’s a conversation with actors. Stylistically it’s a departure because it’s a comedy, so formally it’s a bit different. But every piece is different.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
