by Nigel Williams adapted from William Golding's novel
seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 11 October 2025
William Golding's famous novel is now over 70 years old and this stage adaptation was written in 1991 for a school production and first performed professionally in 1995. But the big question at the heart of Lord of the Flies still remains all too pertinent: to what extent is "civilised society" just a veneer concealing humanity's innate cruelty and violence. The issue is crystallised in the story of a group of British schoolboys - ostensibly the exemplars of good behaviour - stranded by a plane crash on an uninhabited tropical island with no surviving adults. What will they do?
Notoriously they start with high ideals - mostly suggested by Piggy (Alfie Jallow), who sees the reluctant Ralph (Sheyi Cole) as the obvious person to lead - but these are compromised by boyish inattention to detail, high spirits, and eventually the disruptions caused by the charismatic Jack (Tucker St. Ivany) who disputes Ralph's authority and causes a fateful split. Things only go from bad to worse as Jack's gang becomes increasingly rebellious and violent, partly through inadvertence and partly through Jack's visions of "the Beast".
It is difficult to depict a tropical island on a bare stage, and difficult too to present the group of boys as young enough to match those in the original novel, or even for that matter in Peter Brook's celebrated film. Director Antony Lau and designer Georgia Lowe have made virtues of necessity: the stage is utterly bare, the backstage area starkly revealed to the audience, and it is littered with the moveable crates one sees at airports, which make for handy props. The boys are all young actors, some making their professional debut, but clearly at the very end of their schooldays if not beyond them. In a space that is unadorned, surrounded by black walls and black crates, the cast evokes the island with impressive conviction, and also manages to convey the curious mixture of swagger and insecurity which might typify the reactions of young boys cast on their own resources. Wisely, the boys we see are the "big'uns", while the "little'uns" (the youngest survivors of the crash) are only referred to.
At times it was difficult to understand exactly what was happening: there was too much noise and frenzy on stage. At times there was a strange disconnect between the theatrical space and the imagined space: towards the end of the play Jack seated himself at a piano and gave a spirited rendition of "The Great Pretender" as the chaos that he had unleashed began to spread. But at other times the spectacle was completely engrossing, and the group dynamics superbly realised. The boyish taunts ("stupid" being the ultimate put-down or insult), the playground bullying suddenly turned frighteningly serious, the anxiousness to please authority and the nervousness when authority seemed to be absent, were all convincing. Perhaps the full horror of what happens was weakened by the inescapable fact that the cast was older than the boys they were playing, but it was a fine production of a powerful adaptation..
