Zahra Newman is well acquainted with the racism at the heart of the role she’s about to tackle. When she was 14, she and her mum emigrated from Jamaica, settling in Brisbane.

“In the first year I had teachers telling me to go back to where I came from,” she says. “And this was 2002, it was not the 1980s. Not that era should be an excuse.”

We’re speaking ahead of the premiere of The Hate Race, adapted from Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir of the same name. Also of Jamaican descent, Beneba Clarke is a slam poet, novelist and teacher; her parents emigrated from London to Australia in 1976.

The book details her experiences growing up in Sydney in the 1970s and ’80s, contending with systemic racism from students, teachers and the broader community. It’s a shocking insight into what she experienced – and continues to experience.

Newman is familiar with the racism, feelings of isolation and sense of non-recognition Beneba Clarke describes.

“The difference between somebody like Maxine and somebody like me… is that I am an immigrant; I understand the ways in which I don’t fit in and the ways in which I have to operate in order to understand codes. When you are born here and people tell you you don’t belong here, that is a whole different kettle of fish.”

One thing that quickly became apparent to the teenage Newman was that she should modify her Jamaican accent. In an effort to fit in, she adopted a way of speaking more akin to North American.

She moved to Toowoomba after high school to study acting and, despite making good friends there, found it “culturally bereft”. Later, she would draw on her experiences there for Wake in Fright.

“I was the only non-white person in my class, and I did not want at any point for there to be even the inkling or a suggestion that I was there for some reason apart from my capacity. I had to be better than the best white person,” she said at the time.

Newman, who is based in Sydney but trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, says there’s a lot of trust involved with adaptation, particularly when dealing with the memoir of a living person, as she is with The Hate Race. Beneba Clarke has been involved with the work’s development since the idea was first mooted years ago. Declan Greene, who directed Newman in the Malthouse’s stunning adaptation of Wake In Fright, is the show’s dramaturg, and it is co-directed by Tariro Mavondo and Courtney Stewart.

One-person stage shows are notoriously demanding but incredibly rewarding, says the 38-year-old actress. Last year, Newman wowed local audiences with her performance as jazz legend Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. In an extraordinary vocal feat, Newman had to nail the songs as well as act. After seeing the show, written by Lanie Robertson, in New York, with stage and screen actress Audra McDonald as Holiday, Newman knew she had to play it one day. She was on stage for all but a few minutes of the 95-minute production, accompanied only by a band and MC.

Newman says she is drawn to one-person stage shows for many reasons. For a start, the form allows her to dispel some of the myths around theatre.

“People walk into a theatre and the lights go down and they can kind of sit back … and just watch, like TV. I find it interesting … to challenge that in the context of a one-person show and to expose that this is a really different experience to the one we had last night. I am the same person doing the same content but you [the audience] are integral to shaping how the story goes,” she says.

“We’re breathing the same air, you are not not implicated in this story, the play: you are part of it.”

There’s also the intensity of creating such a work, the necessity for “an almost fierce relationship with your outside eye, your director”. “It means you really get to work with and know that person and you feel like you have much more involvement in the world-shaping.”

As well as the physical and emotional challenges involved, there’s often a massive script to contend with. “It’s a lot of words. A lot of words,” she says with a laugh.

Speaking to this masthead about Wake In Fright and her role as John Grant, the middle-class school teacher who finds himself in the mythical town Bundanyabba, Newman admitted to some concerns about tackling the classic text. “But getting somebody who is female and an immigrant to talk about male culture in Australia throws a different lens on it.”

Newman drew parallels between herself and Grant being seen as outsiders. “The protagonist is somebody who’s not from this town and gets ‘welcomed’ into the town,” she said. “There is a generosity about how he is treated, but everything is conditional. There are things that he has to give up and things he has to adopt. And if he doesn’t do that, then he doesn’t belong.

“That is a very strong metaphor for certainly some of my experiences in Australia. Things like benevolence and fairness and being a good bloke, those are narratives that are sold as defining features of what it means to be an Australian and inside of the novel and our show that stuff is blown apart and exposed. There are a lot of contradictions in those narratives.”

Just months after finishing The Hate Race, Newman will take on Dracula at the Sydney Theatre Company, adapted from Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel. Directed by Kip Williams, it is the highly anticipated final chapter in Williams’ so-called Gothic trilogy, which also included The Picture of Dorian Gray and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dorian Gray wowed audiences locally and is currently doing so for new audiences in London, starring Sarah Snook.

As in the earlier shows, technology and precision choreography will play a significant part in Dracula. Asked about the show, Newman breaks into her trademark wide grin. “I can’t tell you a thing – because we have not started making it. I’m very excited to work with Kip, I’ve worked with him a number of times before,” she says. Williams directed Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, opposite Hugo Weaving, for the STC in 2019.

“It makes you better when someone is challenging your creative instincts, it makes you a better maker and performer,” she says. “[Dracula] is a scale I’ve never ever done before as a solo performer, working with cameras, it will be much more technical. Having that freedom to rub that line with the audience. It will be hyper-designed and very different.”

In between productions, rather than taking a break, Newman will turn her attention to another occupation involving lots of words – her post-grad studies in international relations. She enrolled in a masters a few years ago and will be finishing assignments in between the two productions. Doing something completely different to acting has been “very beneficial, useful, helpful and sometimes necessaryto provide an escape, or a counteraction,” she says.

“Our industry is very small, and you can get very caught up in that and it can be all-encompassing and seem like there is no way through it,” she says. “To have something I am equally passionate about that I can engage with that uses a different part of my brain – and sometimes a similar part of my brain … is fundamentally rewarding for me and manifests a response that is unequivocal.

“The industry that we work in is so subjective; it is about taste and people’s personal [reactions], and the way that criticism works, it’s very, very diffcult, you have to do a lot of work to separate your job from you as a person. Being able to get feedback that is positive and doesn’t operate in the same subjective way, it feeds that little part of you that just wants to know ‘Yes, I can do things!’”

On the small screen, Newman can be seen in the romantic comedy Long Story Short on Netflix and has appeared in Wentworth, Rush and Neighbours. More film and television is likely down the track but for the moment she’s “full up with theatre”.

Newman’s first one-woman show was random, about a family of Caribbean descent, written by British playwright debbie tucker green in response to teenage knife crimes in London. A monologue poem for four voices – Sister, Brother, Mum, Dad – the play is written to be performed by one black actress. As soon as director Leticia Caceres read it, she emailed Newman, telling her, “I’m sending you a play. We’re doing it.”

The play toured to Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in 2010 and Newman recalls being “just so terrified by the whole thing”. “I got through it OK but I spent the whole time being scared; I didn’t get to feel it, you know, push out into it and enjoy it, the fact of doing a one-person show. And so after that I was keen to get to do it again and make sure that I could enjoy it.”

She got that chance when random was restaged at Belvoir Theatre in 2018, after her turn in the Australian production of The Book of Mormon. Going from such a massive production to such an intimate show is the kind of gear change Newman seems to relish.

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Having performed in community theatre in Jamaica, Newman was hooked from an early age. Coming to Australia meant more opportunity, something she’s grateful for. “I would never be an actor if we didn’t come to Australia. It’s not a feasible choice in terms of making money in Jamaica as an actor... Even people who are professional actors have other jobs.”

Drawn to Beneba Clarke’s voice and style of storytelling and her background as a poet, Newman loves the way she uses language infused with poetry. She first read The Hate Race when she created the audio book version and is overjoyed to perform a role that taps into her heritage. “Any material that is Caribbean-specific or has any tangential relation to that is a nugget of gold for me because I don’t get to engage with those sorts of stories or utilise that part of myself [often].

“People aren’t exposed to that culture a lot. There is a tiny, tiny diaspora of Caribbean people in Australia but it’s very spread out and not coalesced, as some other nationalities are. We’re too small and there are not enough of us.”

But the book and the story resonate with other communities, says Newman. “There are access points, tangential, indirect connections into other experiences that can find their way into the story as well.”

As for how she manages the physical and emotional demands of the solo shows, she says it changes with each work. During the Billie Holiday show, for example, she needed to take days off and not see anybody.

“With Wake in Fright I was really energised, OK, let’s do this … I could do this again, I could do this forever, I could do lots of stuff and see lots of people and do lots of things outside, I had no problem. So it really depends on the show and you sort of learn that as you do runs and figure out how that works for you.

“It’s not necessarily about the intensity of the content, for me. Everybody is different,” she says. “The one thing that I do for a certain number of hours before show time is nothing else, it’s just about me getting into work, that’s pretty consistent.”

And after the show? Some of it is boring, Newman says with a smile. “For the Billie Holiday show I needed 10 to 15 minutes to warm down my voice. Some shows it’s just as a simple as a shower – not terribly exciting stuff.

“There’s a little bit of magic in what we do but it’s also a job. Sometimes you just finish and get on the tram and go home and say hi to your partner.”

The Hate Race is at the Malthouse Theatre from February 28.