Hot on the heels of Malthouse’s Looking for Alibrandi comes another stage adaptation of a much-loved novel about growing up in Australia as the child of migrants. Published in 2014, Alice Pung’s Laurinda sees an Asian-Australian teen from a working-class suburb win a scholarship to a posh private girls school. Together with Melbourne Theatre Company’s Associate Director Petra Kalive, writer Diana Nguyen has added a little Freaky Friday to this Mean Girls tale in order to emphasise how classism, racism and other kinds of prejudice – both casual and overtly nasty – most certainly don’t end at graduation. As the pair observe in this play’s program, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, “life is nothing but high school”.
While Pung’s novel is set entirely in the 1990s, when teen Lucy Lam attends Laurinda girls school, the play begins with grown-up Lucy in the present, before thrusting her back in time to inhabit her own Laurinda-era body. This scenario’s potential for fish-out-of-water comedy is underplayed. Instead, the fantasy high jinks come from Lucy’s interactions with Linh, the...
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