Ten years is a long time in theatre. When Marcus Romer's award-winning version of William Golding's novel debuted a decade ago, its bracing physicality, pulsating soundtrack and young cast who really looked like schoolboys gave a thrilling edge to a story of lost innocence and savage desires. Even the minimal design, with its skeletal airplane like a "scar that ripped through paradise", added to the foreboding, as the survivors of a plane crash on a remote desert island start to fragment into factions.
Pilot has since moved on, and is doing excellent work, and so has theatre - but this production seems curiously set in amber. The physicality now looks only so-so set against the recent choreographic experiments of even mainstream theatre, and a show that appeared to have relocated the story to a timeless future - in Nigel Williams's faithful adaptation - seems marooned in the past. None of the schoolboys would pass muster in a group of modern teenagers. It doesn't help that most of the cast simply look too old.
This was a show that always sacrificed the reflective for a racing narrative, and it certainly keeps you gripped. It also drums up a terrific sense of atmosphere and is successful in suggesting that "the beast" that the boys so fear lurks in each and every one of them. With the exception of Tony Hasnath's Simon, however, doomed by his outsider status, few of the performances mine any depth of character. What was once thrilling now seems rather tame.
