“I first came across Lord of the Flies when I was at school, and it was so different from everything else that we studied, it felt like it was about all of us. I cared about who these characters were. 

Often at school you study books that are brilliant, full of ideas, but they feel overly theoretical and not concrete or tangible in terms of action and events. The thing that I was most struck by with Lord of the Flies was how much happens in a very short space of time. And that was really thrilling."

"It was written in 1954, but it hasn’t lost any of the significance of what happens within the story or how captivating it is. The themes still feel urgent today. Isn't that terrifying? The fact that it can be written 70 years ago and still feel like it's about right here, right now. The last 70 years have seen so many advancements in so many different areas, but who we are as humanity, as a society - that hasn't changed. We're still self-interested. We're still striving to survive. Those are things that are fundamental to this story." 

"You only have to turn on the news and you can see characters from the story. You can see them in our global leaders. You can see them as captains of industry or businessmen. That's one of the enduring brilliances of the novel: how well Golding got to the heart of the matter and found a way to distil humanity into each one of these characters.

There are so many elements of this story that are pertinent to today, and I think that the strength of the story is that it didn't feel as if we needed to set it now. The storytelling is so clear in both the Golding novel and Nigel's adaptation, that the best thing we could do was to present the story as it is.

The people then are the same as the people now. And so, for us, I think it was about leaving enough room for the audience to make that connection, of giving them enough to root the characters and the context into the 50s, whether that's through costume or some of the music choices, and then leaving everything else there for the audience to go, ‘Oh, yes, I see that person’."

"I want this production to give people a sense of possibility, which doesn't feel like the obvious choice, given how dark it is and how much of it is about society crumbling. But I hope that the style of the production and the way that we want to tell the story gives people a sense of artistic possibility, of being surprised, of the world being different. I want this production to give them a sense of adventure, and I don't just mean living on a desert island, but that people will go, ‘theatre can be really exciting and thrilling’, in ways that they may not expect."

An excerpt from an interview with director Anthony Lau, further extracts will be available over the next few weeks or watch our video below. Lord of the Flies opens in the Festival Theatre on Friday 19 September, running for just three weeks. Grab your tickets now.