Shocking tragedy of a family at flashpoint Jada Alberts in This Heaven: Picture: Brett Boardman Source: Supplied By Nakkiah Lui. Belvoir Theatre, Sydney. THIS angry and passionate play goes somewhere very few indigenous plays have gone in the 40 years or so that contemporary Aboriginal theatre has been developing, changing and growing. It shows violent protest as a completely understandable response to the pain and outrage that urban indigenous people have experienced in the face of the violence that has been inflicted upon them. The comparatively gentle and reconciliatory drama of playwrights such as Jack Davis is left far behind. It is shocking and confronting in a way that is never - or at least only in its opening scenes - preachy or didactic. What makes it work so well, apart from the fine cast and the sure touch of Lee Lewis's direction, is the rapidly growing urgency of its action. At the opening, a family have just learned that their lawsuit against the police, concerning the death of their father in an incident that may have involved police violence or may have been a result of a car accident, has failed. There is nowhere else for them to go, no obvious line of appeal. You can't fight them; they'll get you every time. And so we watch with increasingly horrified sympathy as the two children of the family, driven by a need to effect the change that the law has denied them, set out to do something in their own way. There is their mother, a survivor of the Stolen Generations, played with great dignity by Tessa Rose as a woman who has seen it all and just wants quietly to protect her children. There is a sympathetic white lawyer (Eden Falk) who has tried to help but is now at a loss as to what to do next. There is a policeman (Joshua Anderson) who turns out to have been involved in the incident but who is presented with more complexity than might be expected in such an angry story. The action is interspersed with dreaming stories that the children have been brought up on by their loving mother but somehow, in the 21st century, don't seem to be enough. Above all, there are the two young people driven into activist protest. Travis Cardona plays a young blind man whose involvement in the incident with his father has left him with a residue of guilt and anger. The leading character, played powerfully by Jada Alberts, is Sissy, a young woman who is studying to be a lawyer but who, having seen the law fail her people, takes matters into her own hands. The final scenes are tragic and breathtakingly affecting. That it should come to this. The writer, Nakkiah Lui, is a newcomer with a powerful voice and something to say. I hope we will see much more of her work. Tickets $35-$45.