Lord of the Flies is one of the great myths to have emerged from the 20th century, claims the director's notes, and it's an intuitively attractive idea ... it certainly sank in for me when I read it for high school English - Ralph, Jack, Piggy, Simon, the conch, 'the beast', the whole powerful set of images and themes. And this production attempts to interrogate both that myth, and notions of gender (and gender politics) that underpin it, by flipping it so that all of the protagonists are played by girls rather than boys (albeit retaining their names and nominal genders in dialogue) and staging the island through a progressively more disrupted, broken-apart domestic setting of wardrobes, chests of drawers, an armchair, a made-up double bed and so on.
Enjoyable though it was, it's left me a bit in two minds. There was a strong energy to it, including in the performances (though the cast as a whole was a bit uneven, the key performances were solid), and an intensity that served it well in highlighting the violence of the characters towards each other. And good use of the set, quite effectively - and at times inventively - drawing out the possibilities of the various permutations of furniture (often pulled apart and in pieces) and other, both as stand-in geography (e.g. the girls crawling under the bed to emerge on another part of the island) and as more or less subtextual reimagining of the setting itself in light of its quasi-relocation into this desert of the (feminine qua domestic) real.
On the flipside, though, I'm not sure how far the production actually succeeds in shedding light on those underlying questions pertaining to gender &c - while 'Lord of the Flies' works well when performed by women (girls), and I felt my own responses to it being conditioned by that gendering, ultimately it seems a very similar kind of story, suggesting that, as is perhaps assumed by Golding's original, the savagery depicted is after all universal. Still, regardless - perhaps partly because - of that, I feel like the images of the (female) actors who inhabited those familiar characters for a couple of hours last night in the Tower theatre have now been added, integrated, as facets of how I imagine the characters themselves, which is something in itself.
(w/ Meribah)
Enjoyable though it was, it's left me a bit in two minds. There was a strong energy to it, including in the performances (though the cast as a whole was a bit uneven, the key performances were solid), and an intensity that served it well in highlighting the violence of the characters towards each other. And good use of the set, quite effectively - and at times inventively - drawing out the possibilities of the various permutations of furniture (often pulled apart and in pieces) and other, both as stand-in geography (e.g. the girls crawling under the bed to emerge on another part of the island) and as more or less subtextual reimagining of the setting itself in light of its quasi-relocation into this desert of the (feminine qua domestic) real.
On the flipside, though, I'm not sure how far the production actually succeeds in shedding light on those underlying questions pertaining to gender &c - while 'Lord of the Flies' works well when performed by women (girls), and I felt my own responses to it being conditioned by that gendering, ultimately it seems a very similar kind of story, suggesting that, as is perhaps assumed by Golding's original, the savagery depicted is after all universal. Still, regardless - perhaps partly because - of that, I feel like the images of the (female) actors who inhabited those familiar characters for a couple of hours last night in the Tower theatre have now been added, integrated, as facets of how I imagine the characters themselves, which is something in itself.
(w/ Meribah)
