William Golding would have loathed Survivor, if not for smug host Jeff Probst, then for its disservice to anthropology. The new age solemnity in the endless reality television series looks so bogus when compared to the dark power of Golding’s fable about the ease with which the spark of civilization can be snuffed out. 

A set text for generations of students, the themes have been picked apart in countless schoolboy essays. As theatre the challenge is how to make a work practically analysed to death feel fresh and newly minted. So it’s a relief to report that McColl and co-director Hera Dunleavy and their young cast have created a cracking 90 minutes of high energy theatre. [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

William Golding’s 1954 masterpiece is lodged within the psyche of generations who encountered it as a favoured school text. The novel offers an accessibly intelligent treatment of big themes and delivers a slap in the face to the romanticised view of childhood as a font of innate virtue.

Auckland Theatre Company’s interpretation opens with a sharp depiction of the careless anarchy of a contemporary classroom where cellphones are automatically raised to record a casual piece of bullying. [More]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Auckland Theatre Company’s stage production makes a nod to the usual medium the Lord of the Flies story is inherited: the secondary school classroom. A bookend, invented by Director Colin McColl and his cast, sets the leads as contemporary high-school students encountering William Golding’s 1954 novel. Project artwork of various pig heads, beasts and plane crashes dot the classroom wall. It doesn’t take long for the unsupervised boys to engage in stimulated sexual violence. Once Peter Daube’s teacher arrives, its back to the desks, and one-by-one the boys produce the symbology and motifs of the text that English teachers are so fond of: Piggy’s glasses, the conch (perhaps the most important, the teacher ruminates), and of course, a dead pig’s head. 

It seems to be a laboured attempt too to connect with the 2000+ high-school students who will see the play during its run, and a scene no doubt, that has played out many times before in classrooms across the globe. I remember the lists of symbols and themes of my Year 12 English and those class discussions.  I remember Golding’s vision holding a dark fascination, something subversively appealing when considering what would happen when society’s veneer is up-ended. As countless NCEA essays have already questioned, is savagery our natural state? It’s one of those ultimate ‘what-ifs’: when society crumbles, will you prove to be a Ralph, a Piggy, a Simon, a Roger, or a Jack? [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Everyone has studied William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at school – this is the thesis that initially brings us into this new Auckland Theatre Company production of Nigel Williams’ adaptation. 

We’re introduced to the performers as modern school boys, lazily struggling to focus in class, listening to their teacher (Peter Daube) read from the Golding text. They’ve each been asked to bring an item that identifies themes of the work and so we are reminded of these familiar icons that we grew up studying in a similar environment – Piggy’s glasses, the pigs head, the knife, the spear – and that will inform the proceedings of this play. 

The boys fall into reverie, sleep and imagination, and so a deconstruction begins, of the verbal, visual, the historical, even the characters.  The structured institutional set falls into entropy before our eyes and becomes the forest, hill and beach central to the environs of the story.

This is an excellently clever way of pulling audience in early and introducing us to the theatrical abstraction of the text that is the life blood of this production.

Nigel Williams’ core script is tightly wound and concentrates on the humanity at the core of the main characters.  It is a great place to start to allow the boys adventure and ultimate decline into savagery to fully shine a light into a modern audience. 

It is completely clear that Colin McColl’s direction of the cast has been a careful labour of revision of both the book and this adaptation coupled with pure collaboration with his very young cast.  McColl is aware that many who have studied the book have been starchily schooled in a world of cyphers and metaphors using Golding’s text, so each actor has been extensively workshopped to provide their characters with a truth and immediacy.

Central to this production, Leon Wadham creates a troubled, noble Ralph who is so flawed in his honourable quest to keep order amongst the boys that he is lost by the events that spin out of his control elsewhere on the island. It’s a remarkably understated performance, but Wadham is utterly clear, concise and controlled in every aspect of his performance: a natural leader, both within the character itself and as a versatile, high-profile actor. 

As the intellectual, over-weight Piggy, Zane Fleming avoids cliché and makes this iconic character his own by investing in the pathos and fully understanding the plight of the bullied. He imbues him with an over-earnest seriousness and finds a unique, awkward physicality that allows Piggy to be the central inciting focus of the production.

Jordan Mooney’s mutinous Jack Merridew is at his best in the early stages of the performance; all straight-backboned prefect full of misguided ideas of what it means to be an ‘adult’.  His transformation to the primal isn’t totally convincing however, but this may be more to do with the brevity of the adaptation rather than anything in his delivery, as he is a direct, clear, distinct performer with plenty of craft. 

The creative, imaginative core of the themes of the book is Simon, here played with an immense physicality by Anton Tennet. His understanding of the mental illness at the core of the person informs much truth and oozes a discomfort from whatever corner of the stage he is positioned.  His epileptic breakdown is vividly realised and Tennet manages it with pure energy and strength, but this feels like the most obvious thematic choice of the production as the Jesus motif is played strongly. 

Each other member of the supporting cast, right down to the local Kings School choirboys, keep themselves massively focussed on telling the story and sustaining the energy. Again, it is clear that McColl and co-director Hera Dunleavy have spent a considerable amount of time with each and every boy to make sure their heads are within the world of the play and that the essential truths of the situation and characters are understood. This could easily have had the feel of a school play, but to their credit it is invested with huge truths, danger and energy that transcend its core influences. 

Tracey Collins’ remarkable set is a huge structure of gridded jungle gyms that unfolds from its forced perspective to create areas and height that engage the immense theatricality and still recognise the society the boys have left behind.  All of Natasha Pearl’s props support this by being found school-room ephemera that suggest the boys’ collective imaginative process of creation and destruction. 

I would have liked to have been a bit more witness to the deconstruction of the set, as it feels like a remarkably theatrical moment. But, it seems for practical reasons, the lights are dipped for the scene change and we’re only given the minimalist video wall, created by AUT students, and the broken intimidating rumblings of composer Eden Mullholland’s soundscape to illustrate the change.

This Lord of the Flies is a terrific world-class production of a well-known, much studied text.  It is exciting to know that many school groups will get to see the characters, who usually come across as cyphers on the page, come to life and bring a new fresh vision to the modern relevance of Golding’s vision of human nature.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer