AT least since 1975, when Peter Weir’s film version of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” hit our screens, so-called “Picnic” tourists have been annoying locals at Mt Macedon in rural Victoria by climbing atop the famous rock and shouting, ”Miranda, Miranda!”

She’s the most beautiful of the three schoolgirls who vanish into the rock in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 fictional mystery. Miranda is “like a Botticelli angel”, and like her mathematics teacher Miss McCraw and her schoolmate Marion, she is never found.

It’s been called an “Australian horror romance” and now the National University Theatre Society is putting it on stage in an adaptation by playwright Tom Wright, first seen at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in 2016 and then in Edinburgh during 2017.

Artistic director of NUTS, Claire Holland, sees the mythic tale as “nightmarish Australian gothic” and “an eerie contemplation on female adolescence within the Australian bush”.

Staged back-to-back with the company’s physical theatre version of “Peter Pan”, the NUTS production is directed by second-year English student Matilda Hatcher, who joined the society last year backstage, but all hands are on deck as they grapple with the theatre space in the New Kambri cultural centre on campus.

“It’s not 100 per cent what we envisage as a place to work, but that’s not Kambri’s fault,” she says of the new drama space.

“In the bureaucratic process there was a lack of understanding as to what the theatre community needed, but at least we have a black box and seating – the A/V elements could certainly be enhanced.”

As she approaches “Picnic”, Hatcher has jumped straight into surrealism, sometimes using walks from the Japanese Butoh style, sometimes masks, always following the precepts of French director Antonin Artaud, who once advised: “Real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt”.

In doing so, she believes, they have created “a tale of missing children and the horrors that lurk at the corners of our imagination”.

Five female performers will play five present-day Melbourne schoolgirls struggling with their own suppressed erotic power and the need to solve the mystery of the missing girls and their teacher.

In Wright’s chiller-thriller of a script, the potential for history to repeat itself becomes very real as they take on the role of the missing girls, the headmistress Mrs Appleyard; Albert, the lower-class coachman; the upper-class Michael Fitzhubert and all the other roles. Everybody plays at least two or three characters.

“Tom Wright’s adaptation uses lyrical language, not the kind Melbourne schoolgirls would use today,” Holland notes.

“But it gives us room to craft our own interpretation.”

In his script, the present-day schoolgirls revisit the past, with time jumps often indicated in contrasting modern and historical dress.

“We have explored the idea of both being in the past and having the modern girls still feel the experience today… it’s really interesting how the performance develops in unexpected ways, nothing is safe,” Holland says.

As director, Hatcher has deliberately played up the horror side, “to electrify the story… to make audiences feel uncomfortable to put them on the edge.”

“It’s eerie, quite eerie but there’s a frenetic energy that comes out of nowhere,” she says.

It will “terrify the pants off you”, one UK critic wrote.

“Picnic at Hanging Rock”, Kambri Drama Centre, ANU campus, Acton, 7.30pm, May 8-11, Book at nutspresentspicnic.getqpay.com