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This little piggy never makes it
Set for a double period of brutality: Ralph (Declan Mosson), Jack (Jordan Laight) and Piggy (Ben Adams) Lord of
the Flies Palace
Youth Theatre, Redditch **** WHEN
Peter Brook filmed Lord of the Flies
in 1961, he took his little bevy of mostly amateur actors to the
Caribbean: Puerto Rico, and the small island of
Vieques, off the Eastern Coast. The result: a
masterpiece of black-and-white filming. The
youngsters of Redditch’s Palace Youth Theatre – and the numbers game
required that many boys’ roles here were taken, often superbly well, by
girls - had no such luxury with which to conjure up the remote paradise
on which their aeroplane has crashed, wiping out all adults. Yet in this often first-rate
production, director Liz Sifford demonstrated with her promising cast
time and again what can be achieved with scant or simple resources. The restrained set (Alan
Sifford) spoke mountains. A vast shattered cockpit, eerie, blackened,
hung over rear stage left like an evil eye: the Beast, you felt, could
see all, hear all, sense all. As an omen of what is to come in the
story, as barbarism conquers humanity, and Christian values yield to
idolatry and unbridled evil, it could scarcely have been bettered. On the other side, a rock –
the rock. I lost count of how many imaginative blockings Sifford
managed with her actors – two simple levels, used to astonishing effect:
a benign gathering place, but increasingly a marshalling yard for
monstrosity. When the hunters gather, you sense the moral order about to
be inverted.
A gentle alliance between two
boys – Ralph (an increasingly assured Declan Mosson, middle class
decency to the core; his meditative speech over the conch following
Piggy’s demise, and breathless soliloquy while pursued, were classics)
and an asthmatic ‘Piggy’ (the intelligent, gently gawky Ben Adams – the
‘Me auntie says’ type) – they alone, in a nice touch, have pure white
shirts at the start - offers a safe haven for lost and orphaned younger
children, before being assailed and riven by the sneering, amoral head
chorister Jack (the pretty terrific Jordan Laight), a tyrant in the
making. All are practical or, in the
villains’ case, moral victims – of ambition, bullying and bluster, of
domineering and cruelty, and ultimately out-and-out violence, which
consumes one boy (Simon – Katie Booth), wipes out a second (Piggy),
nearly destroys a third (Ralph) and sullies all but a remnant of
innocents whose values remain unaltered. The quality of performances
here was remarkable, and extended throughout the cast. As an aside, I
particularly liked Tazz Palmer’s Maurice – the problem member, a
thinker, holding back his own Jack-like propensities – and his sidekick
(I think Eve Parker’s Bill). These were performances that held the eye
and ear every time they emerged. Maurice’s soliloquy on Piggy’s death
was one of the best – and best spoken - things of the evening. The small idiosyncratic one –
I think Molly Seaborn’s Percival? – the child who ‘saw the beast’ -
created poignancy and atmosphere every time he uttered. He in fact sees
things as they are: presciently, ‘Is it war, then?’ Alex Cottom’s initially
unimposing but increasingly warmongering Roger went on to prove a
ghastly lesson in Martin Bormann-like loyalty to the leader. Mein
Führer, right or wrong; Roger became (here, as in the book) almost
more ruthless and bloodlusting than Jack: quite some achievement, given
Laight’s brutal portrait of grisly implacability. However one stood out from the
others: out of Simon, Katie Booth built an extraordinary, troubled boy.
Mosson’s Ralph and Adams’ Piggy are differentiated by their basic,
old-fashioned decency (the others in their group have not yet aged
sufficiently); but Simon is ‘other’: he is a mystery, as if of, or in
touch with, another world. Booth captured all of this,
and more: The first hunt for the pig was
superbly enacted; but almost already, we were getting onstage the signs
that the ‘real’ pig would be Simon. This was high quality directing,
anticipatory, on the pulse; and with it went hugely poignant, impressive
acting. Booth’s Simon also squeals –
cries – like a pig. It was an unnerving and harrowing vocal
effect, and with the boy’s fabulous, almost yelping soliloquy - albeit
not all of which you could quite catch the words of - only added to the
growing evidence that this was a remarkable, profoundly empathetic
performance.
There were odd touches from
Sam n’ Eric I liked, just here and there from Jordan Searle’s Eric, the
gawkier of the two - tied, as it were, at the waist. Jack (the only
choir aspect I didn’t like was the rather weedy robes the new
arrivals initially turned up in) never gave an inch: Laight’s stance,
and moves, were never less than forceful, her capacity for barefaced
aggression impressive (‘Chiefs don’t have to say; chiefs decide’); she
handled dialectic like a master disputer. Her words some times lacked
the penetrating clarity of her sharper corrupt young accomplices, but
the verbal battle with a rebellious (and not yet committed) Maurice was
terrific on both sides; and Jack’s Houdini-like response to the
challenge ‘What do you want to do?’: ‘I want to dance, I want to feast’
sounded a pretty attractive proposition. Simon’s death is, amongst other
things, Jack’s turning point. From then on, he is pure evil. The moves were strikingly well
mapped, and I increasingly liked the blocking – on and off the rock:
some repositionings had a powerful impact; several small units were
cleverly arranged, not least as the two sides (or sometimes three
groupings) became important. Sifford had drilled her cast
to know exactly what they were doing; there was not a single
hesitation. I didn’t quite understand why Ralph seemed somehow caught up
in the capture of Simon (although an impressive pink cyclorama impacted
well), but I suspect it may be true to the book. Piggy’s death was perfunctory,
underbuilt rearstage and too brusque – almost comic - and weakened by
the fact the play, or this reading, didn’t dictate earlier the symbolic
breaking of his glasses, so crucial a prophetic sign and a turning point
in the whole. Roger’s late obscenity, while funny, was out of character
with the rest. The staging of the initial
crash was so intelligent – characters skilfully arranged, with no props,
to look like an airline cabin – and the use of light so effective from
the outset, that this production won us from the start. The end of the
Brook film, when the camera pans up from a terrified Ralph on to the
foot and then white shorts of a naval officer, is too much to be able to
equal. I thought the final chase of Ralph was a mite weak, and the
denouement itself, well enough done, could have been more strikingly
choreographed. But the moment of silence before it – and several other
such earlier in the play – seemed brilliantly judged. The curtain calls
were impeccable, and that’s always a sign of a good show. Roderic Dunnett
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in her you could sense, see even, the magic of his intuition, perceptive
way beyond his years; his moral compass (he is, indeed, the stranded
party’s ‘soul’); and worst of all, his apparent death wish.