Young adult performers accepted into Hunter Drama’s elite Actor’s Company course recently gained the opportunity to work with renowned playwright Katie Pollock.

Now, from Thursday 30 June, the talented group of 16 will present the multi-award-winning author’s Normal at the Civic Playhouse.

It’ll be staged until Saturday 2 July, with performances daily at 7.30pm and a Saturday matinee at 2pm.

An urban detective story in which the investigator is a teenage girl and the body is her own, Normal is inspired by a real-life case which took place in Upstate New York in 2011.

A number of females in the town of Le Roy started to develop symptoms resembling Tourette’s Syndrome.

They experienced facial tics, limb spasms and verbal outbursts and, for a while, Le Roy became a focus of media attention, as doctors, psychologists and scientists tried to discover what lay behind the phenomenon.

Was it an infectious disease, group hysteria brought about by social media or the result of a toxic fallout from a train derailment, as suggested by environmental campaigner Erin Brockovich?

In Pollock’s interpretation of the tale, the main character, Poppy, has developed a tic, a twitch, a spasm.

It soon spreads through her body, then through her group of school friends and before long, the whole town.

Nobody can explain it, but as the disease spreads, the community begins to fracture along lines which turn into deep fissures.

Who or what is to blame? And how are they going to fix it?

Earlier this month, Pollock travelled to Newcastle to spend a day workshopping the performance with the Actor’s Company.

To say she was impressed with what she saw would be an understatement.

“For me, what’s been a real choice in this production of the play is the way the actors have brought their true self to it, their emotional centre,” Pollock said.

“They’ve really explored what it means to them as individuals and for them within their society.

“I started working on this play in 2014 and, obviously, the culture has changed in that time.

“It was first produced in 2019, in a production which featured four adult women playing eight characters.

“We’re in such a fast-moving culture that things have changed in that time but the essence of everybody feeling out of place remains.

“When you’re a young person, you feel that sense of not belonging, not fitting in, not being the person everybody else expects you to be.

“I’m no longer young and I still feel this.”

Pollock said each of the [Hunter Drama] performers brought their own perspective to the production.

“With this wonderfully large group of actors, we get the physical embodiment of what is going on inside their hearts and their brains,” she explained.

“It’s been such a joy to see the Actor’s Company explore this work.

“It shows me it is truthful for them and will, I hope, be meaningful for the audience.

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have explored their production with them in this way.”

Actor’s Company is for students from Year 12 and older who are committed to honing their dramatic skills, particularly in regard to demanding physical theatre.

The course is taught by Hunter Drama’s head of drama Allison Van Gaal, who said the amazing, contemporary work was the perfect vehicle for them.

“When I say this, I don’t say it lightly, Normal is my favourite play I’ve ever directed,” she stated.

“It’s a relevant, insightful, exciting, thought-provoking contemporary voice.

“For the students to have the opportunity to explore all of its nuances with Katie in person is such a gift.

“It was a follow up to a Zoom workshop we undertook during the second COVID lockdown last year, when the production had to be postponed.

“To have the additional time and Katie’s guidance to realise this production to this extent is a rare and unexpected positive to the hard road we have all faced during the pandemic – particularly these young adult performers.

“I’m so lucky to be working with such amazing students.

“We are all super proud of the boundaries we have pushed to create this unique piece of contemporary theatre.”

Tickets are available through the Civic Theatre Ticket Office.