Lord of The Flies @ The Mayflower, Southampton
I was hugely impressed by the Regent’s Park Theatre production of To Kill A Mockingbird when it toured earlier this year, so I was eager to see how they’d approach another modern literary classic. William Golding’s story of children who turn feral when left to govern themselves is a very different beast from Harper Lee’s coming of age tale though…
The first thing that greets you as you enter the auditorium is an impressive set, undergrowth and a beach spill out from the proscenium arch, but the eye is immediately drawn to a piece of plane fuselage that will provide space for the cast to move about, climb and slide around.
The play is ostensibly set in the modern day, one of the children wields a selfie stick and there’s a painfully drawn out section of dialogue where the kids talk about “banter” that may have been copied from the comments section of Lad Bible. It’s a smart move to engage the teens in the audience who are there because they’re studying the book for their GCSEs, but it seems anachronistic alongside the rest of the script that has a distinctly 1950’s air about it, as if the cast of Skins meet the Famous Five.
Thankfully the impressively energetic cast more than make up for it. They tirelessly leap, clamber and run about the stage and while there is a noticeable lack of subtlety about many of the performances, there are also moments of startling pathos. The deaths of two of the boys hit home, not least because Keenan Munn-Francis as the intelligent but withdrawn Simon and Anthony Roberts as poor, beleaguered Piggy give two of the most rounded (pardon the pun) performances.
Luke Ward-Wilkinson is equally impressive as Ralph, his pain as he has to decide between being right and being popular is all too familiar to anyone who remembers their teenage years.
This is a fine production and, if there’s any justice, one that will attract a generation of young people to their local theatres and tempt them to come back again in the future. The script mars what could have been something brilliant, but it doesn’t hide the wonderful performances!
