Blaque Showgirls (Malthouse Theatre)

No one could accuse playwright, actor and activist Nakkiah Lui of being glib. In the theatre and on the TV screen, she has been an outspoken and passionate voice, challenging the marginalisation of Aboriginality that incessantly plagues Australia, even to this day.

She is, however, a realist. Instead of being persuasive, bludgeoning an audience with such a shaming subject matter —  regardless of its validity — can have the opposite to the desired effect. Humour, on the other hand, is not only the great diffuser of tension, it can also be easily double-hinged to serve a bruising subtext while preserving that all-important accessibility.

Lui's pantomimic adaptation of the '90s sexploitation film flop Showgirls is a two-edged sword such as this. With its caricature characters, cartoonish set and toilet humour, it's a side-splitting night of entertainment, but this daffy, tacky and brazenly un-PC show is also a conduit to a stern political message.

Whiter than white Ginny Jones (Bessie Holland) is a victim of racism, or so she believes. Despite being unflappably devoted to her Aboriginal heritage, her kin in the country town of Chithole have repeatedly rejected and mocked her for her inexplicably Aryan complexion. In her quest to find solidarity and acceptance, she heads to the bright lights of Bris Vegas. There she is free to follow in her dead mother's footsteps by joining the glamorous ranks of the Blaque Showgirls, the most authentic Indigenous burlesque review in the state. 

But this dream won't be easily realised. To get to the top, Ginny will have to impress dance captain Kyle MacLachlan (Guy Simon), stand up to queen bee Chandon Connors (Elaine Crombie), learn new dance moves from beachfront spunk True Love Interest (also Guy Simon) and, if there's time, lend a helping hand to her newfound bestie Molly (Emi Canavan), a poor, put-upon, Pan-Asian waitress.

Lui's comic instincts, especially when it comes to satirising Indigenous discrimination, have been well tested as a writer and performer in ABC's Aboriginal sketch show, Black Comedy. But free of the stifling guidelines of TV censors, her script for Blaque Showgirls goes fully feral and totally trashbag in the best possible way. By turning up the wattage of various Aussie stereotypes to thermonuclear levels, the outrageousness of the farce lands its political punches with even more wallop. There is, of course, the unavoidable irony that this story of blinkered white privilege and cultural appropriation is being presented via a medium overwhelmingly skewed towards the affluent and the white, but I suspect this is a very conscious connection by Lui, taking this subversive parody to an extra-meta dimension. 

Director Sarah Giles isn't afraid to run with the crudeness of Lui's narrative - there's a pussy-grabbing showdown that would make Donald Trump blush and more than a few scenes writ large with wincingly offensive racial slurs - but it allows this production to make its most accusatory moments all the more glaring. There's a moment when Elaine Crombie's Chandon blasts the audience with a shrieking explosion of frustration. It's a raw, raging and emotionally uncaged expression of exasperated fury, as if a powder keg of injustice had suddenly been ignited. In the context of the show it's seemingly funny and concisely OTT but, like much of this blisteringly relevant new comedy, no less damning in its message.

Malthouse Theatre presents Blaque Showgirls to 4 Dec.