There is an inexhaustible charm to the high school coming-of-age story. Like a piece of gum stuck to the underside of a graffitied desk, it seems to endure for better or worse. Alice Pung’s much-loved 2014 novel, Laurinda, is one of the better recent examples of this tried and tested form.
Pung’s novel tackled the well-worn scriptures of its genre with humour, emotional acuity and an emphasis on the ways coming-of-age is informed by racial and class biases. It followed Lucy Lam, the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese immigrants chosen as the inaugural recipient of an equity scholarship that takes her to Laurinda, the ‘biggest Catholic college’ in Victoria.
It is brought to Southbank Theatre as part of Melbourne Theatre Company’s Next Stage Commission by comedian Diana Nguyen and director Petra Kalive. Like Pung’s novel, Nguyen and Kalive handle the complexities of Lucy’s experience with an unbridled humour that does not shy away from difficult truths. Yet, while often touching, the show trips over its attempts to remain faithful to Pung’s novel while adapting it for the stage.
We open on 38-year old Lucy Lam (Ngoc Phan) in a moment of crisis. Her high school bully has been chosen to present her with an award to commemorate her teaching career. Now a supreme court justice, this bully’s appearance recalls high-school anxieties that Lucy has long since forgotten. Soon after, another friend from her school days, Linh (Gemma Chua-Tran), Lucy travels back in time to the tune of George Michael punctuated by excerpts from Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech for the One Nation Party. The stage is set, then, by 90s nostalgia sharpened against the edge of 90s xenophobia.
At Laurinda, Principle Mrs Grey (Georgina Naidu) treats Lucy as an emblem of the school’s supposed diversity. The school, capitalising on her ethnicity and social class, simultaneously see each as traits to be resolved by the education and prestige it offers. Racist dog-whistles and classist stereotypes abound as Lucy navigates her new school and entitled friendship group.
There’s Katie (Fiona Choi), a misfit and Silverchair obsessive, Trisha (Georgina Naidu), a prodigious piano player, and The Cabinet, a Mean Girls-style clique that rules Laurinda’s halls with the easy power that comes with privilege. All the while, her older self, pushed on by Linh, revisits the same high school memories with the shock of one that has intentionally repressed them.
The choice to frame the story through Lucy’s older self distinguishes this production from Pung’s novel. While an initially interesting reinterpretation – Pung chooses instead to make Lucy write a long letter to Linh about her experiences – it ultimately fractures a plot that is already overwrought. In attempting to include most, if not all, the relationships that feature in the novel, including a relationship with the silent Linh, the show spreads itself thin.
Tully (Jenny Zhou), a friend Lucy leaves behind at her old school, never returns after airing her resentments. Brodie (Gemma Chua-Tran), the relationship around which the framing narrative depends, is relegated to the periphery when Lucy develops a frustratingly superficial relationship with one of the other popular girls’ mothers. Similarly, Lucy’s relationship with her mother is minimised to make room for various subplots – a stolen Daniel Jones autograph, a prank gone wrong, a manipulative teaching aid, or an old friend left behind.
These storylines are teasingly introduced before being swiftly discarded. This is a particular shame as the scenes between mother and daughter are among the show’s best. Chi Nguyen is brilliant as Lucy’s mother, and the choice to have her speak Vietnamese, and Vietglish unsubtitled is both an authentic portrayal of a diasporic family dynamic and a beautiful evocation of the innate connection shared between her and Lucy. As it stands, the show is spread so thinly across all of these relationships that it saps them of their potential and compromises their contribution to Lucy’s narrative arc.
Oddly enough, critiques of the show are often explicitly acknowledged by characters. ‘Why are we moving through these memories so quickly?’, Lucy bemoans of the show’s rapid-fire scene transitions. Why indeed? Most jarringly, Lucy repeatedly questions the purpose of recollecting her time at Laurinda. With every query, she is effectively naming the fragility of the show’s narrative through-line. What is the purpose of this time-traveling journey?
When we return to Lucy in the present day and her anxieties surrounding the reappearance of school bully, Brodie, we have been given little reason to justify her anxious response. Like many of the show’s relationships, Lucy’s and Brodie’s is too underdeveloped to validate its plot or offer Lucy the reason she so often looks for to justify her own narrative.
Still, there is a charming bombast to many of the show’s ensemble scenes, particularly in dance sequences choreographed by Xanthe Beesley and Vietcharm Traditional Dance Group Rehearsal, and performed with infectious energy by a cast of exceptional physical performers and comic talents. And while the choice to have actor’s play multiple roles exacerbates their thinly drawn characterisation, it offers these skilled performers an opportunity to flex their adaptability that each of them rise to. Gemma Chua-Tran is particularly enigmatic as the fiery Linh and precocious Brodie. And Georgina Naidu switches between benevolent adult and earnest pre-teen with hilarious precision.
Set and AV Designer, Eugyeene Teh, must also be commended for creating a surreal visual backdrop that perfectly complements the show’s stylised settings and characters, though blurs the line between Lucy’s memory and reality.
It is telling that Kalive and Nguyen speak of wanting ‘to find the ‘heart of a moment’ in adapting Pung’s novel together. It is individual moments in Laurinda, when taken alone, that resonate with the sharply tuned wit – ‘always humour’, Nguyen and Kalive write in the show’s program, that similarly enlivened Pung’s novel. But split between so many different elements, the piece falters and, most frustratingly, we lose sight of what made Pung’s novel so affecting in the first place - its investment in the relationships that propel Lucy’s adolescence.