Laurinda takes the stage: ‘Private school culture needs to change – the insularity, the entitlement’

‘I definitely don’t feel like my peers were equipped with the nous that young people are now’ … Ngoc Phan as Lucy and Gemma Chua-Tran as Linh. Photograph: Brett Walker

Alice Pung’s young adult novel Laurinda opens with a simple epigraph: “Life is nothing but high school.” This quote, from the US writer Kurt Vonnegut, distils a confronting truth: the things that happen to us as teenagers can, and often do, follow us through our lives.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s adaptation of Laurinda, co-written by comedian Diana Nguyen and Petra Kalive (who also directed), magnifies this phenomenon by splitting Pung’s much-loved book between past and present. Her protagonist, Lucy Lam, is both 15 and 35 in this version: we see her as a teenager in the 1990s as she navigates her eponymous private school, where an elite group, The Cabinet, reigns supreme. Always present is Lucy’s friend Linh, the only person who really gets her.