Canberra REP breaks all the school rules with Lord of the Flies

Posted on 24 July, 2024

Why is it, after all this time, the idea of young people left alone scares us?

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies exactly 70 years ago, and in the years following, his novel has come to represent some deep, unbidden fears, that children (and perhaps humans more generally) are defenceless to the destructive power of chaos. It has been parodied in the Simpsons, translated to film by Peter Brooks, and most recently adapted to the complex ecosystems of teenage girlhood in Yellowjackets and The Wilds.

When Lachlan and I approached this play however, it was not necessarily children that drew our attention. You only have to look to the sympathetic victims of the novel, Piggy and Simon, to see why. Rather, as we began to explore what this production might look like, news outlets began to report on the ‘Melbourne private school boys rank[ing] female students according to attractiveness’.

This echoed of the group chats of private school boys leaked the year before, and the misogynistic chants recorded on train lines, the year before that. The world we were recreating this classic narrative in, was one waking up to the undercurrents of discrimination threaded throughout the schools where our supposed ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were being taught. It’s a  terrifying thought, considering how fragile democracy already appears when we reflect on the men and sometimes women who currently hold power – both here and overseas.

As young directors – our own high school years not that far behind us – we knew it wasn’t in children the violence of Lord of the Flies was vested. It’s privilege . Privilege and power. To make this play all white, and all male, in the wake of this revelation, became the most boring choice we could have made. Lachlan is a private school graduate, and I am public school one (shoutout to Karabar High, just over the border), and our experiences of privilege were deeply eclectic, and defined by the communities we had come of age in.  As we discussed Piggy being the only character to mention a woman in the novel (his aunt), and we reflected on the leaked group chats popping up at seemingly every major all-boys school, it became clear to us that our cast had to be as reflective of those absent of privilege, as it is of those who wield it.

Our final cast is definitively not all-white or all-male. Instead, they range genders, and races and stretch across the unconventional age range of 16 to 25. We have everyone from high schoolers to full-time university students – and even the odd consultant. When Jack asks, “[w]ho’s he anyway?”, an initial question of weight and class, becomes fourfold one of gender and race. Jack’s speech on “strong leadership”, becomes even more charged, when the white, masculine power he holds echoes that of our very own politicians, just a stone’s throw up the road.

What is hopeful at least, is that not all the children on this island are enamoured by Jack’s vision of strong leadership. Piggy and Simon speak to the need for shelter and structure, and even our reluctant leader Ralph resists the allure of fun when faced with the childish, but nonetheless accurate call of ‘fair is fair’.

To cast and direct this show as it was first written, 70 years ago, feels untrue to the questions at the core of Golding’s tale. When Ralph states, “You can wear your hair like that if you want to” as Piggy is teased for looking like a girl, and later on pleads “I was voted. It was democratic”, it is clear our concerns for a loss of order are no less prevalent for a diverse emerging generation than they were for the sons of Lords that originally inspired this unrelenting story.

To quote Golding:

“My book was to say: you think that now the [Second World War] is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”

I pose then, that we are not scared of children left alone, but rather, that we might instead be scared that when we leave children alone, it reveals just how early violence and privilege are taught. That when doors are closed, children might act too much like the worst of us.

It is a fear this play deeply comprehends – when the child hunters patrol the skyline of our almost deserted island, Nigel William’s adaptation states quite clearly, “It’s frighteningly adult”.

Feature image supplied.