Lord of the Flies ★★★½
The font used in the titles of this four-part adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel is (or appears to be) the same as the typeface (Albertus) used by its publisher, Faber. That is indicative of the overall sense of fidelity with which Jack Thorne, author of the series Adolescence and the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, approaches the project of adapting one of the most revered (and, IMHO, best) novels of the 20th century.
That’s not to say the show doesn’t also have its own identity, much of it down to the sometimes inventive (and sometimes intrusive) direction by Marc Munden and the electronic score by Chilean composer Juan Cristóbal Tapia de Veer.
The pair worked together on The Third Day, the fabulously bizarre 2020 series in which Jude Law plays a man who becomes trapped on a tiny island off the coast of Britain where pagan rituals hold sway. And this tale of castaways descending into a kind of frenzied madness has something of that same trippy quality.
The central premise is that a bunch of English schoolboys find themselves on an island after their plane crashes (during a war, in the book, but unexplained here). No adults, no food, no rules. They’re on their own – and freed from convention and the straitjacket of civilisation, they quickly descend into superstition, tribalism and violence.
It opens with Piggy (David McKenna) waking on the rainforest floor, cloaked in trench coat, sweater and school uniform. He soon meets Ralph (Winston Sawyers), and sees in the older and quietly confident boy the makings of a natural leader.
Blowing into a large seashell (the famous conch), Ralph summons the other survivors, half of them, like him, on the cusp of adolescence, half of them much younger littluns. The last to emerge from the jungle, black robes flowing and berets atop their heads, are the choir, led by Jack (Lox Pratt), who takes immediate umbrage at not being in charge.
And so the ground is laid for the inevitable clash, not just between Ralph (representing the democratic impulse) and Jack (a proto-fascist bully), but between order and chaos, civility and violence, rationality and superstition.
There are, in all this, shades of the themes which Thorne explored in the extraordinary Adolescence. There, much of the blame for the emergence of toxic masculinity in teenage males is laid at the feet of social media. Here, it is innate. Golding’s thesis was that brutality is a kind of natural state to which we all – or almost all – will descend if unshackled from social convention. It is grim, but students of the modern world would find much evidence to support that outlook.
The location (a Malaysian island) is used to great effect, at once a prison and a playground for the boys, and a site on which to enact the rituals that will mark the transition to manhood.
Their young bodies carry the marks of their transition, first shedding the bulk of their clothing, then daubing their flesh in mud and blood, and finally wearing the scars of their battles. The colour palette – which sometimes renders shades of green as reds and orange – occasionally imparts a hallucinatory quality to proceedings, as if everything that happens were the product of a tropical fever dream.
Not everything here works, though. The performances are a little uneven (inevitable with a young and largely inexperienced cast), and the pacing is sometimes a little too languid for its own good. But there’s no denying the power of the story.
Nor, sadly, its relevance. More than 70 years after it first appeared, Lord of the Flies feels as bleakly pertinent as ever.
Lord of the Flies streams on Stan – which is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead – from February 8.
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