We’re not quite on a Pacific island in Matthew Bourne and Scott Ambler’s Lord of the Flies. Instead we join this crew of schoolboys in a place that is part-deserted island, part-abandoned theatre.

The boys march in, hair neatly combed, socks pulled up straight, regimented and educated. Their lines are as neat as their shoelaces as they weave past each other, yet there is a sense of play and joy in this structure. Finding themselves in the dark, they use mobile phones to light the space. Ralph (Dominic North) finds the master switch, turning on the lights of the theatre. They look over this new world in wonderment.

The conch horn of William Golding’s novel becomes a drum mallet, pounded on an oil barrel. Large spotlights hang from the flies as vines would curve down to the jungle floor. The boys play between costume racks and in wicker clothes baskets. Lez Brotherson’s design opens up the State Theatre: we see the concrete ceilings and black walls usually hidden away from the plush red velvet edifice of the auditorium. Theatre, we’re shown, is a construct of fake walls and fake beauty – and, as these boys are about to learn, so is the world as they know it.

This dance-theatre work, making its Australian debut in Melbourne, brings together a core team of professional dancers with a community ensemble of 23 spanning the ages of 10 to 25, selected from workshops held throughout Victoria with more than 450 boys and men. The world Bourne and Ambler build is fuller because, through this ensemble, the lines between character and performer so often blur: this community we see on stage is Australia’s community, with different personalities, and different physical strengths and weaknesses.

Dance, so often, is about the search for perfection. Ballet, in particular, has physical aims that sit so far outside of the norms of human capacity, and yet to be successful means to appear as if the act takes no exertion at all, to perhaps surpass the shortcomings of the corporeal in the search for perfection.

But Golding’s Lord of the Flies doesn’t look at a humanity searching for perfection. His novel equates humans with animals: arguing that structure and nurture are all that separates society from barbarism. As these boys find themselves stranded, freed into a world without authority or convention, they revert back to their basest animal instincts under the leadership of Jack (Daniel Wright), all muscle and rage.

In exploring this notion of humans as animals, the production relies on its community ensemble, allowing Ambler and Bourne to destabilise the idea of dance being a search for perfectionism. Ambler’s contemporary choreography holds with it echoes of dance from across the world: haka, tai chi, morris. Lord of the Flies isn’t about how precisely you move your body – although the cast thrive in the choreography – but about the story you tell with it.

The work is at its most compelling in the young boy who doesn’t keep his arms completely parallel to the floor as he pretends to be an airplane; the young man who steps ever so slightly out of time; the teenager whose back curves, not yet structured by the rigidity of dance training. Lord of the Flies is at its strongest when it’s at its rawest: telling the story in metaphor not literalism; in Terry Davies composition of heavy drums and ethereal boys’ choirs or the strange wheeze of the melodica; in Luke Murphy’s Piggy falling back on himself, stumbling through blindness; in Patrick Weir’s Simon, who plays with tenderness and hesitation.

Sadly, it is North’s Ralph, the central character, who is the weakest part of the production. The symbol of goodness in Golding’s book, here, that goodness is represented through what we traditionally understand to be “good” dance: perfect balance, perfectly stretched toes.

North never lets himself cross over to the pull of the island; to the pull of the body as beast. Even when in a fight, he holds himself neatly balanced on the balls of his feet. But by placing this studied energy of ballet against the bare energy of movement that the rest of the boys lean further and further into, Ralph stops being an allegory for the good that exists in humanity and instead sits quite outside of the story of humanity this work wants to tell.

As the boys are rescued, leaving without their innocence, Ralph sits, supposedly shocked by all that he has witnessed. But it is not Ralph who we want to spend time with. As difficult as it is to watch the world burn, the destruction caused by the boys feels much more urgent; their humanity feels much more like ours; their rage feels much more like the world as we know it.

• Lord of the Flies is showing at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, until 9 April