Letters to Lindy, by Alana Valentine, Lieder Theatre Company, Goulburn, until June 20. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

Founded in 1891, the Lieder Theatre Company can lay claim to being the longest continuously running theatre company in Australia.

It is also one of the most up-to-date when it comes to staging modern plays and tackling contemporary issues.

Its latest production, Letters to Lindy, was first presented in 2016 by Merrigong Theatre Company in association with Canberra Theatre Centre, but, as directed by Blake Selmes, it has lost none of its punch as it lays into this country’s hostile media landscape. The real Lindy will be at the Lieder Theatre next weekend.

Almost entirely drawn from the many thousands of letters addressed over the years to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, once convicted and later exonerated of the murder of her baby daughter Azaria in 1980, the play tells us that the case divided Australians in much the same way as the Whitlam Dismissal. Roughly 70 to 76.8 per cent of Australians believed she was guilty, largely driven by extraordinary media vilification, and even now around 30 per cent believe Lindy took her daughter’s life. Imagine if it had happened in the era of social media.

Selmes, who also makes several cameo appearances in the production, has pulled together a powerful show within an imaginative set made up of archival boxes, a nod to the fact that the letters now reside in the National Library of Australia. Messages, poems and images are projected onto them throughout the performance.

Ever-present throughout the action is the figure of Lindy herself, played by Erin Williams as a resigned, benign and at times humorous version of Lindy; not the hard-edged woman so reviled by the public, but a warm, motherly and sympathetic one.

She is surrounded by a chorus of commentators, letter writers from the public, jury members, members of the judiciary, journalists and her extended family, offering a wildly varied cavalcade of characters for Lieder Society members to perform, as they do with gusto.

In the opening of Act II, some audience interaction is introduced through song and comic game-playing to lighten the load, something evidently appreciated by the packed house.

But Letters to Lindy is hardly light-hearted. Although it follows the chronological path from events at Uluru in 1980 to the exoneration of the Chamberlains in 2012, with Michael hardly getting a look-in, even the best verbatim theatre can become unwieldy and, 10 years on, the script could have been tightened.

With the verbal interventions of the many small characters, it’s hard to say who is more unbearable, the vicious detractors or the supporters whose letters are often full of self-serving reflections that seem more about themselves than about Lindy.

Yet in one affecting moment, Lindy reveals that the most moving message she ever received was a simple three-word note, “My heart bleeds”, which meant more to her than the thousands of other messages.

This production certainly exonerates her and concludes on an almost overly warm note, with the recitation of a tender poem to baby Azaria and the questionable projection of Azaria’s living image.