Just write the best work you can, and don't
don't wait for permission from anyone.
Don't worry about whether or not you're gonna be
validated by older, whit, cis, patriarchal culture.
Like, fuck that culture. Do,
do the kind of work that you want to do,
and then make the cultural change you want to see.
Anchuli Felicia King is more than just a 25-year-old
Thai-Australian playwright, she's a hilarious,
hardworking, multi-disciplinary artist with the
world view of someone who has lived 1000 lives.
From creating plays featuring all female, all Asian
casts, to having her work shown across the globe,
Felicia opens up about the difficulty in having her
success to reduced to her identity politics,
or young age.
From her thoughts on Crazy Rich Asians,
to the story behind her new legal drama, Golden Shield,
Felicia is a trailblazer in Australian theatre,
who doesn't wait for permission.
She gives it to herself and gets it done.
You have to be the person who makes it
because you can't sit around waiting for
opportunities to be afforded to you.
And part of that is operating at a level of like
artistic rigour and excellence, you know,
proving that we're not just making work for
our own communities, we're making work
for everybody, and fighting really hard to make sure
we're in the kinds of platforms where we're visible.
Can you tell us a little bit about Golden Shield?
The play is based on a number of real court cases.
Chinese plaintiffs sued American tech companies
for their purported collusion in helping to build
the 'Golden Shield', which is the development policy
that's now synonymous with online censorship
in China. And the core of the play is really
this relationship between two Chinese-American sisters,
one of whom is a lawyer on one of these cases.
And one of whom is her translator.
And it's them navigating their complicated familiar
relationship, as a metaphor for the, like crazy
big issues in the play.
Who is your target audience when you're writing?
I think ultimately I am writing for sort of like
young, Asian women. Young women of colour.
People who come see the work have the same
experiences that I have when I'm in the theatre
and see myself being represented or
see something that makes me go like 'oh!'
'I didn't know stories could be told like that!'
'I didn't know that I could be; people like me
could be on stage in that way'.
I didn't know there could be a play with an
all female, all Asian cast. - Yeah exactly!
I feel a real responsibility as an artist,
and an artist who is lucky enough to work in different
places around the world, to make sure that I am
pushing that conversation, creating sort of like a
paradigm shift in every situation that
I'm working in.
You've taken the words out of my mouth
I literally wrote down here
from an outside perspective, I feel like you carry
a lot of responsibility on your shoulders
to explore ethics, politics, diversity,
I imagine that sometimes it gets a little exhausting?
Totally. It's unfortunate that so often
the burden of this kind of like emotional labour
and advocacy falls on people who are historically
marginalised, but I also feel very strongly
that it's an enormous privilege to get to do it.
And part of the impetus for writing White Pearl
was just this sort of like all Asian female cast.
And even writing plays like this for bilingual actors
was just people I knew who weren't getting work
and I knew were brilliant because I was in a grad school
environment with them and I was like 'this is unfair!'
One of the things that fuels me as an artist
oddly enough is the sense of like, injustice.
And, sort of like healthy levels of rage
at sort of mainstream white institutions,
and the complacency that comes with them.
And even, you know, seeing stuff like Crazy Rich Asians
and Always Be My Maybe and be sort of like
one: I think that like the level of solidarity that I saw
around those films and the way
that the Asian community responded to it
it's so heartening to people, and it's heartening to me
to see that happening.
But also, I think that there are more complex stories
that we can be telling within our own community.
And we should be aspiring to more.
A lot of the subjects, the genres are still
a little bit two dimensional. - Totally.
You can't cast actors in complicated parts
if the complicated parts aren't there.
Damn. - Yeah, yeah.
We need more writers of colour who are aspiring
to write more complex work, so that we can have
nuanced representation of people of colour.
So it isn't all saccharine, capitalist fever dreams.
If you write a good story with people who are
interesting and complex, it doesn't matter what
they look like, or where they come from. It is
universal, innately. - It's human.
Right! Exactly and therefore universal.
And do a lot of people ask you about your age?
Yeah. It's something that people have sort of
latched onto, and it's very weird. I think
in Western cultures we sort of idolise youth
and success in youth in a way that I
find a little problematic.
I feel that there are a lot of expectations and pressures
on my work to succeed but also it often
gets reduced to my personal identity politics
in terms of being young, being a woman of colour.
Where possible I try and reframe the narrative to
actually be about my work.
Do you feel those conversations are slowly changing?
Slowly changing, slowly being the operative word.
In an ideal world I think Australian theatre
looks more like Australia, you know.
It's more diverse. And I hope that we can
be part of a global conversation whilst celebrating
our own uniqueness as a culture.
And could you have predicted any of this?
No! I really couldn't.
I mean, all I ever wanted, my entire life
was just to be an artist and subsist.
Not have to work like a shitty day job as a barista.
And, now that I have that I am constantly having
to re-evaluate what my goals are.
Okay, let's make a prediction, right now.
Where do you think you'll be in five years?
Fuck! That's a terrifying question! - Yep.
I hope that I'm still making a living as an artist
Where, I can look back and go like 'here's all that
cultural change that I can see palpably'.
The only thing we're qualified to do as artists,
because we're not experts in the fields that we talk
about, the only thing we're qualified to do is
ask moral questions, actually.
Without necessarily needing to have
clear, didactic answers.
I feel like it's a blanket moral imperative for everybody
but for me it's very important.