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In 2019, playwright and screenwriter Anchuli Felicia King (White Pearl, Deadloch) was the Sydney Theatre Company’s Patrick White Fellow – a $25,000 role that includes a new commission.

She knew she wanted to use that commission to adapt a novel, but she didn’t know which one until she read an article about the release of the first English translation (by historical linguist Ely Finch) of The Poison of Polygamy by Wong Shee Ping.

Anchuli Felicia King (right) and The Poison of Polygamy director, Courtney Stewart.Credit: Steven Siewert

The book is believed to be the first Chinese Australian novel, and was released in serialised instalments in a Chinese language newspaper, starting in 1909.

“It’s not only the first Chinese Australian novel – it might be the first classical Chinese novel in the West,” says King. According to her, it languished in obscurity for a century before some academics found it and translated it.

The Poison of Polygamy tells the story of Sleep-sick (so known because of his opium addiction) and his efforts to make a fortune in Victoria’s goldfields in the 19th century.

“I got my hands on it [the book] and loved it, [but] I had no idea how to adapt it,” says King. “I just had this feeling that it was such an important piece of our history and I thought it deserved a wider audience.

“I think we need to re-conceptualise what the classics are in this country. And this felt like an important classical Australian text.”

Director Courtney Stewart describes the play as “an epic saga about the beginnings of the Chinese diaspora in Australia”.

“It’s a live conversation between the Chinese diaspora of then told by the Chinese diaspora of now”.

Stewart was dramaturg for King’s first play at STC, White Pearl.Credit: Steven Siewert

She continues: “This is an Australian story at its heart. It is also about the Chinese diaspora. And it is also about how the Chinese diaspora reflect on where they’ve been, and where they are now.”

One of the challenges of adapting the novel was its heightened prose, says King. “Classical Chinese is almost like Chinese Shakespeare.”

Another was its origins as a serial, like the novels of Charles Dickens – which means cliffhangers, an unwieldy cast of characters, and a sprawling plot: “It’s designed to keep you coming back for the next instalment in a very Dickensian way. So, I’ve conflated a lot of the characters.”

King also wanted to enmesh the historical, social, and political context of the gold rush in the story – including the extra taxes imposed on Chinese migrants. She did this by inventing a narrator character, the Preacher, a device that allows her to comment on the politics of the novel.

She felt confident of pulling these threads together thanks to her broad swathe of research, including visits to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, and reading on the history of Chinese migration to the goldfields and the way panning for gold permanently damaged the soil and the ecosystem.

“As I did successive drafts of the play, all of that stuff started to get more and more incorporated,” she says.

Stewart thinks the play and the way it tells the origin story of Chinese migration to Australia invites people to think about the question of legacy.

“People become so obsessed with the mark they’re going to leave behind,” she says. “The play, for me, it throws up [the idea that] no matter which way you go about it – whether you’re morally virtuous or whether you do whatever the hell you want – it has the same result if you’re from a historically marginalised group.”

The characters in the play come from different cultural groups in China but have to find community to survive in a new country, where there is the constant threat of violence from white settlers, Stewart explains.

Kimie Tsukakoshi in The Poison of Polygamy at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane last month.Credit: CSQUARE Media

“There’s the same thing with creatives of colour,” says Stewart. “We also all come from different communities and different lived experiences, but because of the way this country treats people who are not Caucasian, historically we’ve had to band together.”

It’s impossible then to escape the question of legacy – a question that lingers on the director’s mind, as the new artistic director of La Boite Theatre in Brisbane and the only woman of colour in Australia to lead a major non-Indigenous theatre company.

“You’re constantly thinking about keeping the door open, so you’re not the last person to do what it is that you’re doing,” says Stewart. “You have the weight of your community on your shoulders.”

King, who has had local success with her plays White Pearl (Sydney Theatre Company/National Theatre of Parramatta) and Golden Shield (Melbourne Theatre Company), left Australia for postgraduate study in New York because she couldn’t see a place for herself in the local industry.

White Pearl opened in Sydney in 2019, and was remounted in 2022.Credit: Phil Erbacher

While Australian theatre and media more broadly have become more diverse in the last few years, she says, “we’re still lagging behind the rest of the world massively”.

“I feel hopeful about the direction that it’s going in, but I still feel like there’s massive work that needs to be done in having media in this country that is reflective of its population.”

That work is one of the things that keeps bringing her back to present her work in Australia – despite the opportunities she is offered in the UK and the US (including on HBO’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer, starring Robert Downey Jr and Sandra Oh).

“I feel a cultural responsibility to keep coming back and making work here to forward that conversation,” King says.

She has become one of a group of theatre makers helping to build an Asian Australian theatre canon, which also includes works such as Single Asian Female by Michelle Law and Golden Blood by Merlynn Tong (who stars in The Poison of Polygamy).

“This is not hyperbole: it’s the most meaningful thing that I’ve done in my life,” says King.

“It’s more meaningful to me than like working on a $100 million dollar HBO show [The Sympathizer] because I have seen the direct impact of my plays on people’s careers and livelihoods and the culture at large.”

Sydney Morning Herald subscribers can enjoy 2-for-1 tickets* to the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales during June 2023. Click here for more details.

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