Merrigong Theatre Company has commissioned a thought-provoking play which is drawing much attention from every corner of the nation.

Letters to Lindy will have it’s world premier at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre on July 26 and explores the public’s fascination with Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton: a mother accused of murdering her child, her claim denied and discredited by zealous police and a flawed legal system.

“Everyone feels that in some way they have an opinion, or their life has been affected by this story. Even people who were born long after,” said playwright Alana Valentine.

“I think a theatre is a place where we can come together as a community. The community in some ways turned against Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton and I hope the theatre can … in some ways reconcile what happened.”

Ms Valentine, who has previously written plays about the notorious Parramatta Girls home and the struggle of the South Sydney Rabbitohs before Russell Crowe bought the NRL team, said she loves to put the voices of people rarely heard on stage.

The play was formulated after being given permission to read some of the 20,000+ letters, which are now kept in the archives of the National Library, written to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton over the past 20 years.

Ms Valentine said there was incredible diversity in the letters and has intertwined pieces of them with narrative taken directly from interviews with Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton.

Merrigong artist director Simon Hinton said the theatre company was committed to creating new Australian productions as well as telling stories that have a universal resonance.

“As well as it being a great window on Australian society, particularly in the 1980’s, it’s also in the end a story about something fundamentally human - a mother who’s lost a child,” he said.

Mr Hinton said while producing the play there has been vast interest further afield, “you always look for something that has a wider life and a wider interest.”

“Historians from the National Library have said the decade of the 1980s, thanks to these letters, was the best covered decade in Australian history,” Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton said.

“Because people told me how much they paid for bread, what they thought of politicians, whether power was going up or down, where the storms were, who won the Melbourne Cup.”

Letters to Lindy will premier at IPAC on July 26, running until August 6.

From there it travels to Canberra, the Shoalhaven and Sydney.