British writer William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is famously the story of a group of schoolboys who become ruled by their own violence while stranded on an island in the midst of a nuclear war. Readers and scholars tend to discuss its themes in terms of the darkness inside all human beings, but in Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Nigel Williams’s stage adaptation, the accent is on masculine forms of control.
Director Kip Williams doesn’t draw attention to how men carve up power by merely changing the gender of the characters; he goes a step further by ensuring there is “not a cisgendered, white, able-bodied white male” among the cast playing these boys.
Film actor Mia Wasikowksa is quietly charismatic in her first stage role as Ralph, the rule-bound son of a naval officer, who becomes the audience’s democratic touchstone because he wants to be chief of the boys by a majority vote. Contessa Treffone, meanwhile, makes a brilliant fist of her alpha character, Jack, who divides and conquers the boys through fear, intimidation and ultimately frenzied murder, sold to his followers as a means of keeping an imaginary beast at bay.
The company’s approach to the text is in marked contrast to film director Peter Brook’s beloved 1963 feature adaptation, which hewed to Golding’s novel and cast all-white schoolboys. For Brook, “male” signified “human” – as though the boys universally somehow represented any configuration of gender – and he resisted studio pressure to include girls in the cast.
Williams’s choice of a racially and gender-diverse group of 11 adult actors thumbs its nose at the white male systems of power and control in the British class system that informed this tale of public school boys (or private schools, as understood in Australia). The cast wear casual clothing, not the school uniforms or choir outfits mandated in the novel and play script, although the most bullied boy, bespectacled Piggy (played by Rahel Romahn with scene-stealing plaintiveness) makes a point of saying he attends a high school, marking him an outsider.
The stagecraft initially disappoints: my heart sank when I saw the setting for the first scene, which resembles a rehearsal room. “It’s all blue,” cries one of the boys atop some unadorned scaffolding, as though he is looking across the sea. But the pitch black walls and floor are lit by 16 ugly white fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling; there is nothing here to denote we are looking at an island. Lighting ingenuity soon provides aesthetic relief, however: 20 additional tubes appear and all 36, now lit in blue, are lowered closer to the floor in various formations to indicate waves of ocean. Later, the lighting turns a blood red, signifying power and chaos as the tubes are unhooked by the cast to become weapons.
Daniel Monks, as violence-enabling Roger, makes an effectively intimidating ally for Jack as he smashes his walking crutch and later the conch shell that was a symbol of democratic order. Elsewhere, however, the director’s suggestion of violence occasionally falls short: the lights are cut when the boys carry out some of their worst acts, robbing these moments of their full power. By contrast, in Brook’s film, when the boys close in on another boy and beat him to death, it is truly a terrifying moment.
This is a small criticism about an otherwise terrific production, however. The pace and rhythm make the nearly two-hour long work absorbing, and the eclectic casting choices enable us to consider Golding’s classic novel in new ways: the meaninglessness of violence and destruction driven usually by testosterone and loud power trips, as well as the arbitrariness of tribalism, racial and class hierarchies, and the universal inhumanity of cries – also uttered here – of “go back to where you came from”.
This production of Lord of the Flies does not lead us to the easy, banal answer that atrocities are committed because individuals are evil or sociopathic. This time, we are obliged to confront the idea that men rule because they have set up structures that play on our insecurities, determining their domination.
