CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques BBC1’s Lord of the Flies: A ripping drama that reminds us we’re solely ever only a heartbeat from savagery
Lord of the Flies – BBC One
How ripping. When civilisation ends, it will happen without a single swearword… and the death of innocence will be all the more shocking for it.
BBC1’s thrilling, engrossing adaptation of Lord Of The Flies, starring an extraordinary cast consisting entirely of schoolboys, is a faithful reimagining of William Golding’s 1954 novel.
Almost immediately, the most striking difference from our own times is in the language. Before we fully grasp how lost and stranded these young survivors are, after a planeload of British evacuees crash-lands on a deserted tropical island, we can hear the gulf between their era and ours.
No F-words, no rapper swagger or four-letter insults. The closest they come to trash-talk occurs during a water fight, when one boy laughingly calls his friend a ‘rotter’.
Lord Of The Flies is an unpretentious allegory. The island is the Garden of Eden, the boys are humanity before the Fall. And of course it’s all going to end horribly.
Since its publication, young readers have been shocked by the brutality of the story. But in the past few decades, the crudeness and cruelty of adult life has begun to affect children much earlier in their lives. That has accelerated catastrophically in the past ten years, with the onslaught of social media, making explicit sexual content more easily accessible online.
Writer Jack Thorne, who dramatised the story for this four-part serial, is more aware of this than anyone. He was the co-creator of Adolescence, the Netflix mini-serial that exposed the toxic influence of the internet on children as a boy of 13 is arrested for murdering a schoolmate.
Now Thorne is probing an opposite source of evil. Theologians name it ‘original sin’, psychologists term it ‘innate depravity’ but, whatever it is called, it requires the firm rule of law and order if it is to be repressed.
Belfast schoolboy David McKenna (pictured) is exceptional as Piggy. He was born with organ failure and had two kidneys transplanted – one from each parent
There is a striking difference between our time and the characters who do not swear at all during their terrible ordeal, writes Christopher Stevens
Piggy, the bespectacled and serious-minded boy we meet first on the island, is the only one of the survivors who grasps this. The others are too egotistical, timid, lazy, laissez-faire or simply too young to see the need for society to have structure.
It is Piggy who, stumbling out of the jungle on to the beach, finds a way to gather all the scattered children together after their plane goes down by using a conch shell as a trumpet.
He’s the only one to talk about the necessity for a committee of leaders, and latrines, food and shelter. Piggy is no more than 12 years old, but he has the soul of a district councillor and a fondness for municipal procedures to match it. When the first disaster strikes, Piggy’s instinct is to reproach himself for not drawing up a full roll call of boys sooner.
David McKenna, the Belfast schoolboy who plays Piggy, captures all those aspects of his personality, as well as the boy’s inner loneliness and his tendency to hero-worship.
Yesterday’s The Mail On Sunday reported on David’s remarkable health battles, born with organ failure and the recipient of two kidney donations, one from each of his parents.
The experiences of his life are bound to have helped him portray Piggy’s own health problems with such conviction – the way he shrugs off his asthma attacks, but is paralysed with literal blind panic when his glasses are taken from him.
Lox Pratt (pictured) plays the sly, bullying Jack in the BBC series that has won rave reviews from critics – including our very own Christopher Stevens
Lord Of The Flies is an unpretentious allegory of the Garden of Eden… and is doomed to end horribly
It’s an exceptional performance, as much in his physical movements as his facial expressions and voice, and you only have to watch him for a few minutes to know David McKenna is a name we will be seeing, with any luck, for many years.
Future episodes will focus more on the charismatic but shallow Ralph (Winston Sawyers), and the sly, bullying Jack (Lox Pratt), head chorister of a group of choir boys, who regards himself as the natural chieftain of the tribe because, ‘I can sing high C sharp’.
We have already glimpsed the nastiness at Jack’s core, as he took sadistic glee in tipping the corpse of their plane’s pilot over a cliff. ‘He made a mistake. A better pilot, a better man, would not have made such a mistake,’ he declared.
Jack’s hunger for power makes him a familiar character in children’s literature – JK Rowling’s villainous Draco Malfoy might as well be his twin brother. But Ralph, though instantly likeable, is no Harry Potter. There’s a weakness in him that hurts us every time it reveals itself: When he laughs out loud at the nickname ‘Piggy’, for example, before revealing it to the other boys.
Like most viewers, I read Lord Of The Flies at school. Long after the details of the story faded, I remembered the novel’s atmosphere, its heat-haze of unease.
Filmed on a Malaysian island, director Marc Munden’s version evokes the surreal quality of a dream turning to nightmare.
The BBC One show is based on literature Nobel Prize winner William Golding’s book
The boys blow the all important conch to summon meetings and those who hold it have the right to speak
That is magnified by the discordant score, by Cristobal Tapia de Veer and Hans Zimmer with Kara Talve, full of 1950s echoes of British composers such as Benjamin Britten and Sir William Walton.
Flashes of crackling white noise suggest some distant cataclysm, a Third World War or nuclear holocaust, while the sun blazes with such intensity that the edges of the picture seem to be melting.
Scenes are intercut with close-ups of tropical creatures such as crabs, caterpillars and salamanders, alarming in their alien appearance because it’s so obvious that they belong in the jungle while the boys do not.
They click their claws and wriggle their feelers, as if to say that, long after our attempts at civilisation have burned up in the sun, the creepy-crawlies will still be here.
