From Trawlwoolway playright Nathan Maynard’s At What Cost? to Marc Fennell’s Stuff the British Stole, or even the opening scenes of Ryan Coogler’s Marvel blockbuster Black Panther, there have been many recent efforts to bring the complex subject of repatriation and colonial dispossession out from the backrooms of cultural institutions and onto the stage and screen.

Into the fray comes Wiradjuri actor, musician and writer Lincoln Elliott with Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical), a nesting doll of a musical wrapped in enough layers of meta-narrative to disorient even the most dedicated right-wing culture warriors.

Presented as a work-in-progress on-stage read through as part of Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the show begins as Elliott and narrator Victoria Falconer walk us through three timelines. In the first, an aspiring writer (Elliott) unpacks the doctoral thesis they’ve written to complete their government-subsidised musical theatre PhD. In the next layer, a group of actors – Natalie Abbott (Muriel’s Wedding the Musical), Rachel Crossan, Joe Kalou, Ava Madon and Adam Spain-Mostina – meet in a rehearsal room to workshop said musical.

A final thread is the musical itself, which sees Winnie (Elliott) – a First Nations man with a PhD in anthropology – recruit his sister Vinny (Abbott), and a rag tag group of old and new friends Matty (Madon), Nelly (Crossan) and Kenny (Kalou) to pull off an almighty heist: to break into the British Museum in London and steal back a historically loaded shopping list that includes a feathered cloak from Hawaiʻi, the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, and a wooden shield with clear real-life inspiration.

Repatriation is an emotive topic, nowhere more so than South Australia where our own local institutions have spent years working with First Nations communities to return ancestors and culturally significant objects – with more threads still to be resolved.

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In this delicate light, Elliott’s approach is a bit of a zag: a wilfully goofy parody with a musical palette that bounces between Hamilton-invoking stage-rap (an early gag about changing the musical’s name to In the Heist scores a huge, knowing laugh) and a 2000s grunge-pop sound that recalls Killing Heidi or, in one of the show’s big crescendos, the debut single by Australian pop siblings The Veronicas.

Artefact’s first half is animated as much by the comedic potential of the heist genre, gleefully rifling through its cliches and hits from The Italian Job, to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s franchise, to that most unexpected art history lesson, Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie.

Later, things take a more poignant turn as the show’s characters each reflect on their own heritage, from the fair-skinned Vinny questioning her own Blak identity (“They want you to forget, they want you to stop fighting,” Crossan’s Nelly reassures her) to the moment Elliott’s righteous burglar Winnie finally holds that long-lost shield in his hands.

“It’s heavy,” he says, in a line that weighs far more than a piece of centuries-old bark.

And yet, this is the same show that devotes its single largest musical sequence to the resurrected ghost of Queen Victoria – Spain-Mostina portrays the colonial collector-in-chief like a drag chimera of Emperor Palpatine and Dame Edna Everage.

Elliott doesn’t try to iron out these discordant elements – he leans into them. The sheer incongruity of tackling such solemn subject matter through the milieu of Hollywood heist movies and contemporary Australian musical comedy is a gambit that, on paper, perhaps shouldn’t work. But it’s Elliott’s commitment to his voice and vision that is the point of the show – a defiance of erasure and assimilation by the colony and the musical theatre industrial complex alike, and a reassertion of agency by those who, according to the old ‘smooth the dying pillow’ logic that once filled museum’s stores, shouldn’t exist.

Those pieces behind the glass are important, as is the history they represent. But so is the act of taking them back, and fulfilling the dreams of past generations who hoped to one day flip the empire’s script. Even if, in the end, it is just that: acting.

“It’s only a small part of what’s been taken; it’s not everything, it was never going to be, but every piece counts,” Vinny tells her brother. “We rebuild slowly, painfully, gradually, little by little we reclaim what’s ours. Our stories, our voices, our identity.”

It’s at moments like these that this repatriation musical brings it home.

Artefact (or, Repatriation: The Musical) was performed at Adelaide Festival Centre on June 11 as part of Adelaide Cabaret Festival