This extract was taken from an interview with Anthony Lau, director of our upcoming production of Lord of the Flies.

“The great joy of reading is that you get to populate the story with your own imagination. You get to picture what the island looks like. You get to picture how these characters appear to you. In making an adaptation of a novel, Georgia Lowe (the designer) and I wanted to reflect that. We want to activate the audience’s imagination and ask, ‘What does the island feel like to you?’

"That always feels like the most exciting thing about making theatre - regardless of whether it's an adaptation, a revival or a new piece of work - how do you encourage the audience to bring themselves to the production. That feels fundamental to the work that we make together as a wider creative team. "

"I often say that Georgia and I are co-conceivers of the projects that we work on, and design is often our way in. And for us, acknowledging the space, the Festival Theatre itself, was a really useful starting point. Let's acknowledge that we’re in 2025, that the audience are there with us, that we’re at the theatre to see a show. The architecture of the space is a real thing of wonder and incorporating that into the world of the play felt crucial, and something that we really wanted to celebrate.

For me, the theatre that we love making, and that I love watching, is work that asks something of me, that makes me a willing participant in the storytelling. Here are some of the ingredients, here is the world I’ve suggested. But what do you bring to the table to complete the picture? Because the audience are the missing piece of the jigsaw. The show is never really complete until they come into the space and you share it with them. Then it feels whole."

"And what feels really exciting is that, especially with such a brilliant theatre as the Festival Theatre, the audience may be used to a design aesthetic that feels more naturalistic, perhaps. With this production, they will see a theatre stripped to its guts, completely open to everybody, and they might be surprised by the vastness of the space.

That feeling of how small you are in such a beautiful cathedral of a theatre is something that I find quite moving, and I hope that the audience do too. I think it will allow them to go, ‘Okay, we're in for a bit of an adventure tonight’, and I think that feels like the best way forward for us in making this show."

"What audiences might get from coming to see this show, is that they get to live out and be a part of the story. They get to be on the island; they get to spend time with these characters. And, over the course of the evening or the afternoon that they're watching it, they might have their own ideas about how these characters live or survive on this island."

Click here to read other extracts or watch our filmed interview here. Lord of the Flies runs in the Festival Theatre from 19 September – 11 October, with tickets from £10. Head to the show page to book your tickets.