The Lord of the Flies, based on the novel by William Golding, adapted by Nigel Williams, directed by Bob Pavlich. La Trobe University Student Theatre @ Trades Hall, closed Sunday.

All of us of a certain age were forced to read William Golding's The Lord of the Flies at school, and dragged along to see Peter Brook's famous film (without doubt my first experience of Brook). I suppose it was considered excellent for the average adolescent to consider his (there are no girls in this story) innate savagery.


Watching it on stage in La Trobe University Student Theatre's very creditable production, it occurred to me that while the book says nothing about so-called "primitive" tribes - such societies have, after all, social tabus and courtesies of a complexity and strictness that rival Regency England - and maybe, beyond a few general platitudes, not much more about universal human nature, it says a lot about the savagery inherent in the European class system of the time. And, for all I know, now. Which is to say, it's most interesting as a social text if read as a savage critique of the civilisation it seems to be advocating.

In Golding's classic story, a group of English schoolboys survive a plane crash on a tropical island. In the course of the book, they rapidly descend from well-behaved public (ie private) schoolboys to murderous tribalism, thus demonstrating the thinness of the veneer that civilisation pastes on our barbarian selves.

The only force that holds back the primitive tyranny that beats in our blood is, according to Golding, the influence of wise and fair authority; a naval captain, for example. At its heart The Lord of the Flies is, essentially, a reactionary text, a cautionary fable about the necessity for patriarchal (preferably English) authority to prevent us all falling into the bloody mire of Original Sin.

Now, don't get me wrong. Anyone who has had anything to do with children (and who isn't blinded by sentimental ideas about childish innocence) knows that children are capable of a cruelty that is unmediated by an adult capacity for empathy, which is a quality that is, on the whole, a learned one. Children also have a limited capacity for foresight: they do not necessarily understand the connection between an act and its aftermath. This is why children charged with serious crimes are not tried as adults: they are considered - in my view, quite rightly - to have diminished responsibility for their actions. There's a lot of truth in Golding's portrayal of childish society.

But there's no escaping the, well, British Empire flavour of the story, or the questionable underlying assumptions about what constitutes both primitive and civilised behaviour. The book's virtues exist in the vividness of its characters and its writing. And yes, it's a fable, and so capable of many interpretations, many of which have been rehearsed in school essay after school essay.

It's a tribute to the commitment of the La Trobe University Student Theatre that they made me put aside my quibbles with the story. I even stopped wondering about Australian public school accents and the fact that a bunch of young women were playing prepubescent boys. Such, after all, is the magery of theatre when it works.

Student productions are often well worth a look: the tickets are cheap, the production standards are generally good and they often feature texts that are seldom done elsewhere. La Trobe, while lacking the considerable resources of the Victorian College of the Arts, put on The Lord of the Flies as part of an insanely ambitious double bill (the other half was Orson Welles' adaptation of Moby-Dick). And, from what I saw, they pulled it off.

Bob Pavlich's production features a minimal set - two scaffolds, a real pig's head, some back curtains and sparely used lighting. It's intelligently staged, with the mise en scene exploiting the height and breadth of the Trades Hall Ballroom. Using Nigel Williams's economical 1992 adaptation, which is briskly theatrical in a Brookian kind of way, the energy of the cast progressively generates the necessary willing suspension of disbelief to make the story wholly absorbing and, ultimately, moving.