One of the notable theatrical successes of the post-pandemic years has been the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s production The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Adapted from Pip Williams’ novel by playwright Verity Laughton, the play takes its audience back to 1886 and to the place where the very first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is being compiled. Its here, in a scriptorium containing paper slips with hundreds of thousands of words and their various meanings, that four-year-old Esme Nicoll has a front-row seat.

While her father and his male co-editors decide which words stay and which go, she collects the scraps of paper containing words considered inappropriate for the project. Piece by piece, she turns them into a dictionary of her own.

From there, The Dictionary of Lost Words follows Esme into adulthood at the height of the women’s suffrage movement and the beginning of the First World War.

The production, which opened in 2023 and later played seasons in Sydney and Mebourne, is now touring Australia with a mostly new cast and some thoughtful refinements, says director Jessica Arthur during a break in rehearsals.

“It’s always a privilege to revisit a work, which is something that doesn’t happen a lot in...