When Nicola Gunn was a teenager, she picked up three different copies of Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in a bookstore to work out which cover she liked. Then she looked at the first page of each, and her understanding of language changed forever.

“The words were in a different order, sometimes completely different words,” she says. “The same book. My mind went ‘what?’.” The three editions were different translations of the same text, beginning a lifelong fascination with the vagaries of interpretation. “There’s no word-for-word translation,” says Gunn. “Language is unstable. It’s just a fiction, an invented tool we created. This fascinates me.”

Apologia, Gunn’s new work which opens at the Malthouse Theatre on Thursday, is her way of teasing out the threads of language, translation and identity. In the show, Gunn portrays herself as a tragic Francophile who aspires to be a French actress. She’s Australian, and doesn’t speak French, but that won’t be a problem. She’ll learn the lines phonetically, and project the studied elegance that French film stars exude. If Frenchness, whatever that is, can be quantified, it can be appropriated. Severine Magois, Gunn’s acerbic French translator friend (or at least, her disembodied voice assembled from hundreds of hours of recorded conversations), disagrees.

“When I was younger I had this romantic idea of Frenchness,” says Gunn. “That it was the epitome of sophistication, elegance and philosophical intellectualism. It’s the romanticisation and the mythology of it that interests me. We all do it, whether it’s people who have a thing for Japan or somewhere else. France is really a placeholder for anyone wanting to feel different. If I feel French, will I be different?”

Apologia is a wide-ranging and irreverent conversation. There are no solutions, only new problems, as Gunn jumps in and out of the borders of identity and explores the friction between the real and the perceived, the original and the copy.

Perhaps the most well-known example of this friction is Paris Syndrome, a condition whereby visitors to Paris, usually from Japan, exhibit severe psychological reactions to a city that looks nothing like the romantic reputation it has acquired from literature, fashion and New Wave cinema. The piece’s second act revolves around a couple of disappointed Japanese tourists, played by co-stars Taka Takiguchi and Yumi Umiumare, looking at the spire of Notre Dame, itself a reconstruction of a reimagining. French, English and Japanese become intertwined in a mess of (mis)interpretation.

Gunn herself lives in a tangle of cultural identities. Born in England, she moved to Australia when she was a child (the accent still comes out on stage), and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Gunn’s theatre work often plays with complex questions of making art and communicating. Previous shows have focused on the pretentious world of high-art academia, and the creative issues arising from bringing children into creative practice. Now she’s taking on the barriers language puts between us.