Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies and the Darkness of Man’s Heart by Dr Brian McFarlane
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Peter Brook: Man of the Theatre There have been few more provocative and exciting stage directors than Peter Brook. Born in London in 1925, he had cosmopolitan roots, his parents being Russian Jews from Latvia, who emigrated to Britain just before the outbreak of World War One. His father had been a political firebrand as a young man, and, when he and his wife settled in London, he worked as an electrical engineer while she had work deriving from her degree in chemistry. Brook’s mother’s culture was essentially German, while his father’s was primarily Russian. There is a great deal more that might be said about how this couple found their place in London, in the middle-class riverside suburb of Chiswick, but suffice it to say there is in their story some vestigial accounting for the maverick path their son would carve out in theatre and film. When his theatrical career got underway in the mid-1940s, he tended to be associated with the plays of such European giants as Jean Cocteau, Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Anouilh, though there is also substantial work in the classics, notably Shakespeare, in opera, and with new names of the British theatre, such as Christopher Fry and John Arden. He may have come into London theatre at a rather staid time of its development, but when he was done with it was considerably less so. He would pursue his iconoclastic way for sixty years. No one who saw it is likely to forget his gymnasium-set A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970-71), in which fairy glades of the forests outside Athens are replaced by bare white walls and trapeze bars. It was a startlingly original – and revelatory – take on a play too often played for mere ‘charm’ at the expense of its essential cruelties. [1] By the early 1960s, after fifteen years of the most demanding challenges and solid achievement, he claimed he was ‘fed up’ with the theatre, and turned his attention to the prospect of filming an adaptation of William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies. Brook’s biographer, Michael Kustow, quotes the then-influential critic, Kenneth Tynan, as urging Brook, “You should make a film of this”, and goes on to say that “Golding’s dystopian fable electrified Brook”. [2] Let’s look at Golding’s book and consider what might have attracted Brook to it.
William Golding’s Uncompromising Vision For decades, every school and university student knew Lord of the Flies not just as an exciting adventure story, but primarily as an allegory of – and warning for – our times. In light of its huge popular and critical success, it is now hard to believe that it was nearly not published at all, when a reader at London’s Faber dismissed it 3
as “absurd and uninteresting fantasy.” [3] Since its publication in 1954, it has scarcely, if ever, been out of print, and is currently available in several editions. It acquired the sort of cult status that J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye did, tapping into the zeitgeist at a time when the world was in a state of uneasy peace, with the memory of world war just behind it and the most powerful nations in the post-war world locked in mutual, dangerously paranoid suspicion. If it is true to say that “the intrinsic cruelty of man is at the heart of many of Golding’s novels”, [4] it is also true to add that the preceding decade had offered unrivalled displays of this cruelty. The uncompromising pessimism of Lord of the Flies informs the whole forward movement of the plot of Golding’s allegory towards its grim denouement. Though it is sometimes referred to as a fable, I’ve chosen to call it an allegory because, though both use narrative to exemplify larger truths or concepts, allegory permits more sustained and detailed treatment of the literal level of characters in action, of the interplay of cause and effect, whereas fable is apt to be shorter and more simply instructive about its ‘moral’. One text writes of “The allegory of ideas [and Lord of the Flies is one], in which the literal characters represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a doctrine or thesis.” [5] Allegorical intentions are signalled in the title, a translation from Hebrew of ‘Beelzebub’, a name often used synonymously with Satan. In Golding’s terrifying allegory, Satan or evil will be located in “the darkness of man’s heart” [6]. That is the true site of the novel’s horror. A sense of pervasive unease in the world at large is suggested: possibly nuclear warfare has erupted and a party of schoolboys is being flown to safety when their aircraft is attacked and the passenger tube containing the children is released from the “other part of the plane. There were flames coming out of it.” [7] Golding is not concerned to give any detailed account of how this has come about: his purpose requires that the boys are somehow put down on a remote tropical island, the passenger tube having scarred the terrain before drifting out to sea. Again, though it is not specified, the boys, though perhaps not all of them, seem to belong to some kind of traditional school whose values surface in a startling range of speech and behaviour. Whatever they have learnt at school, in any case, has not stood them in good stead for maintaining some kind of civilised order on the island. Attempts to hold meetings, elect a leader, organise crucial tasks (huts for shelter, fire to alert potential rescuers, hunting for food) and the division of labour, break down. They are ‘saved’ at the very end, but only after one boy has become ‘lost’, 4
two others have been killed (‘murdered’ is the accurate word), a total collapse of rational civilisation has ensued and its chief exponent has been the victim of a manhunt. It recalls other famous works in which displacement from the routines of everyday life into unfamiliar surroundings causes radical changes in ideas and behaviour. Think of such diverse works as Shakespeare’s The Tempest or J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, both dealing with responses to being wrecked on remote islands, or from another point of view Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, whose very title is echoed on the last page of Lord of the Flies and whose most famous exclamation, ‘The horror! The horror!” kept coming to my mind as I re-read Golding’s novel. “The horror” is indeed what Golding keeps stumbling on in his excavation of man’s lower depths. What Lord of the Flies is absolutely not
is an updating of R.M. Ballantyne’s famous adventure story about shipwrecked boys – and for boys of all ages. I mean Coral Island, that robust paean to manly virtues and good chaps, with three boys making the best of things on their uninhabited Polynesian island, warding off intruders, and finally sailing for England wiser for their experiences. They are called Ralph, Jack and Peterkin; it is no coincidence that 5
the two main contestants for leadership in Lord of the Flies are called Ralph and Jack. Golding’s novel is clearly a kind of riposte to the buoyant Victorian optimism of Ballantyne’s ripping yarn. Whereas Ballantyne’s lads embody and uphold the values of the western civilisation in which they have been raised, these values have lost their potency for Golding, who sees them as no more than skin-deep, easily peeled away to reveal the darkness within.
Brook and the Film: What drew him to this novel? It was not just a matter of Brook’s being ‘fed up’ with theatre (he directed no play between 1960 and 1962), though that may well have made him more responsive to the idea of adapting Golding’s novel, or of filmmaking in general. His dissatisfaction with the English school system, intricately connected with and helping to perpetuate the class system which he also deplored, seems likely to have attracted him to a narrative in which the mores of middle – and upper – class schooling prove inadequate to the strains placed on them. Kustow claims that “it took him nearly twenty years, with his film Lord of the Flies, to settle his scores with the English school system.” [8] He had unhappy memories of his public school, Westminster, writing years later, “school was the smell of latrines, sweat, unkindness and boredom; it was boxing, with blood streaming down the face; it was never being left alone; it was being bullied.” [9] His filming experience up to this point had been sparse, but he had an early love of photography, owning a movie camera at ten, and a little later developed a passion for cinema (and music). While still at Oxford, he and Gavin Lambert had directed an amateur film, A Sentimental Journey, improbably based on Laurence Sterne’s idiosyncratic novel. There was a film version of John Gay’s comic operetta, The Beggar’s Opera, with Laurence Olivier no less, and more noted for its exuberance than for its cinematic fluency. In France, he had made Moderate Cantabile, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras. Neither of these suggested a film director with his feet in the mainstream or his eye on the box-office. The more one considers his CV to this point the less surprising it is that he should have thought there was a commercial film in the story of a plane-load of little boys going native on a deserted island. In his own words, “Kenneth Tynan first gave me the novel. I laid it down so determined to make it into a film that I could hardly believe the news that Ealing Studios had bought the rights…” [10] [Subsequent unattributed quotes are from this source, page references in brackets]
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Down to the Business of Business In the event, Ealing (not surprisingly) decided it didn’t want to make the film, on the grounds that a “project about a lot of kids [was not] going to be a sound investment of £200,000” [p. 193]. Brook, on the other hand, says “all I wanted was a small sum of money, no script, just kids, a camera and a beach.” What he clearly didn’t have in mind was the sort of film that his producer-friend, Hollywood big-shot Sam Spiegel envisaged. Playwright Peter Shaffer wrote a screenplay which Brook describes as “a remarkable six-hour epic [and] the mixture of Shaffer and Golding and Spiegel and myself all pulling in opposite directions was too indigestible” [p. 194]. A year after preparations had begun, Spiegel withdrew, and a young New York producer, Lewis M. Allen, rounded up enough private backers, each investing about $2000, to enable the project finally to get started. (Allen was also the producer on the 1990 remake of the film.) “We knew that we could make no budget, as the sum we could raise was clearly not going to be sufficient, and we could make no schedule, as everything to do with children is fraught with uncertainty. We were going into the unknown and we knew that luck and faith were completion’s only security.” [p. 195] The final budget was $80 000: over half of which had been spent on rights. On his minimal finance, Brook couldn’t afford to bring boys from England, so they had to be rounded up from “British boys who had already got to the States at their own expense…There was no pay – only some pocket money and a share one day of hypothetical profits.” In line with this penny-pinching approach, in contrast to the usual extravagances of Hollywood production, Brook decided to film on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico which was owned by Woolworth’s, who “lent us the island in exchange for a screen credit.” [p.196] If it was a relief to be free from the constraints Spiegel might have laid on the production, “it was heartbreaking after all we had suffered with it to say farewell to Shaffer’s script, but there was now no reason not to go back to my first intention and improvise straight from the original novel.” [p. 197] He wanted his child actors to be able to register the reality of the emotions, the impulses and violence that Golding’s boys experience. He was prepared to trust the responses of his young cast, giving them an impetus for a scene and then letting them bring their own understanding to what they were doing. In the matter of these children, Brook believed that “what the camera records is the result of chords being struck on strings that were already there.” 7
[p. 197] He seems to have tapped youthful urges to greed and cruelty and anarchy: “We had to cake them with mud and let them be savages by day, and restore prepschool discipline by the shower and the scrubbing by night.” [p. 198] As we shall see, his approach – and remember that all this took place over many months – has yielded some remarkable performances from his neophyte cast, at least two of whom (James Aubrey and Nicholas Hammond) appeared in several more films.
The Film as Adaptation Few film-related topics attract quite so much heated discussion, at levels from foyer gossip to learned treatises, as the adaptation of literary works (chiefly novels) into film. Brook seems to have found some very personal resonances for himself in Golding’s novel and his film version in general hews closely to the contours of the novel – and, indeed, to much of its detail. I want to stress, however, that though this may be of more or less interest to viewers, according to how well they know or value the novel, such notions of ‘fidelity’ to the original text are of no consequence in evaluating the film. Much more crucial questions are: How has the filmmaker approached the precursor novel? What has excited him about it? If he is stimulated by the ideas of the novel, how has he gone about rendering these in audio-visual moving images as opposed to words in straight lines on a page? Consider how the film begins. It opens on a slightly hazy long-shot of the dignified façade of what we assume (i.e. if we know the novel) is an imposing traditional school. This gives way to a shot of school photographs of masters and boys, followed by glimpses of boys in classrooms, having lessons in geometry and Latin. These images are all in blurred stills, as if their moments are frozen in time, and then comes the first credit: Peter Brook’s film of Lord of the Flies, followed by more blurry images of British public-school life, including a scene from a cricket match. On the soundtrack, a choir is singing Kyrie Eleison (Greek for ‘Lord have mercy’, a liturgical acclamation which predates Christianity). At this point we can only speculate on why Brook has chosen to represent this kind of social information in a series of stills: can it suggest, in hindsight, that the ‘frozen’ aspect of the images implies that what they symbolise hasn’t prepared the boys for what lies ahead? These images seem to act as a critique of the schooldays Brook recalled years later in a memoir. They give way to another set of stills which speak of warfare, their frames filled with nuclear weaponry, with warplanes flying in formation over Big Ben, with evacuation notices, boys’ laughing faces and louring skies. 8
The singing of a choir has been replaced by ominous drumbeats, which become louder over a map of the Pacific Ocean and a rapid montage of lightning, close-ups of planes, and the fall to earth of a ‘passenger tube.’ At this point the screen fades to black. It is worth stressing this opening sequence, because it is very much a matter of Brook putting his own stamp on the material – and it also, in its own elliptic way, spells out the background circumstances that have led to, and should be kept in mind as we watch, the rest of the film. Kustow is probably right in describing the film as “part of [Brook’s] reckoning with England before he moved on.” [12] The rest of the film begins when a boy, Ralph (James Aubrey), in school uniform, climbs through jungle growth to the accompaniment of natural sounds, including bird cries. This is one of the film’s distinguishing features: the way in which Brook both relies on silence and the sounds of the island on the one hand, and, on the other, maintains some powerfully suggestive musical strands on the soundtrack. Ralph is shortly joined by a fat boy, Piggy (Hugh Edwards), and at once class distinctions are established. Ralph’s “Daddy is a commander in the Navy,” while Piggy talks, with accent and diction that place him lower in the social scale, of his “aunty”, his “ass-mar” and his “specs”. What is also established at the outset is the idyllic nature of the island, with its long curving beach, recorded in a lustrous long-shot, into which a curiously black-cloaked line of boys singing Kyrie Eleison makes its way, with a suggestion of something sinister about it. Brook, who finally took responsibility for the screenplay himself, has retained the overall shape of the novel. The boys on the island after the crash attempt at first to establish some sort of order, with Ralph emerging as leader and stressing the need for meetings, plans and the use of the conch shell to ensure democratic procedures. He stands for a limited liberal humanism, which will be tested and found unequal to the challenge offered by Jack (Tom Chapin), the head chorister. The essence of Jack’s 9
appeal is that of an atavistic savagery and urge to power. When he becomes leader of the hunters, there is clearly an aura of glamour that seduces the boys more than Ralph’s insistence on their need for fire-tending in the interests of attracting rescuers. And the third influence, scorned by Jack and for much of the time undervalued by Ralph, is Piggy’s pragmatic, commonsense approach. Failure to keep the fire going is one result of the gradual emergence of anarchy, blood-lust and killing, civilised values crumbling in their wake. The move towards anarchy is fed by the hunter’s impulse and, as well, by fear of a ‘beast’ on the island. The growth of fear reminds one of that famous 1933 remark by US President Roosevelt: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ The ‘beast’, the briefly-glimpsed flapping parachute of a dead airman in the jungle, is not of itself dangerous, but the idea of it has generated such fear that it leads to the murder of the strangely prescient boy, Simon (Tom Gaman), who is killed by Jack’s painted savages. When Simon emerges from the jungle, Jack’s boys are so fired up by fear and bloodlust, are so ready to kill (as hunters they have relished this function) that they do not hesitate to spear Simon as if he were the beast. One of the fascinating intertextual influences that may strike one while watching the film are those other films with island – or otherwise remote – settings where things go badly wrong. Not all films set on desert islands work towards horrifying ends (see Nicolas Roeg’s Castaway or Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away, or, for pure comedy, the old TV series, Gilligan’s Island), but the threat posed by isolation has been seen to lead to darker prospects. There is a breakdown of human civility, in Richard Williams’s A Little Island, an animated film about three little men on an island who fall to quarrelling because of their different attitudes and ideas; and in the two versions of H.G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Dr Moreau [directed by Don Taylor in 1977 and by John Frankenheimer in 1996], a scientist takes advantage of the island’s isolation to engage in horrific experiments on animal mutation. Another film which hovered in my mind as I watched the hunting down of Ralph near the end is Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey, set not on an island but in remote African jungle through which the protagonist who escapes a vengeful tribe is hunted relentlessly. Virtually no film comes to us without echoes of others, and these can to varying degrees influence how we receive the film we are watching.
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Brook the Filmmaker Very early in the film, Brook creates a potent sense of the island’s beauty without resorting to travelogue effects. By contrast with the 1990 remake (a US film directed by Harry Hook), Brook has chosen to film in black-and-white, the result of which is a stark heightening of the serene beauty of the beach and the threat of the jungle, but without any distracting prettifying of either. There is throughout a lack of studio gloss about the very look of the film: cinematographer Tom Hollyman, whose only film this is, seems to allow the camera to rest on whatever fascinates it. For instance, as it pans the choristers in the early scene on the beach, he allows us enough time to register each face, with many close-ups later of the contrasting features of blond, aggressive Jack, darkly thoughtful Ralph, Piggy straining short-sightedly and, in notably long-held close-ups, the enigmatic features of Simon, who perhaps sees more clearly than anyone and pays for this with his life. The beach is always beautiful, but even that beauty looks briefly ominous as Jack’s choristers first appear, marching in formation. The camera seems also to turn away from what might have been moments of graphic horror: the killing of the pig, the decaying parachutist, the deaths of Simon and Piggy, and Brook’s austere choices in these matters serves to emphasise the screen-filling close-up of the pig’s head on the stick, placed there by the hunters to propitiate the ‘beast’. When Simon sees it and suffers some kind of hallucination in the novel, in the film the head, with flies crawling in and out of it, becomes a detail of what Brook would call ‘evidence’. He wrote that “the reason for translating Golding’s very complete masterpiece into another form in the first place was that, although the camera lessens the magic, it introduces evidence.” [12] In this particular case, Golding’s prose creates what is going on in Simon’s mind before he collapses, what he imagines the pig’s head as saying. When he comes to, he realises that “the beast was harmless and horrible,” [13] and Brook – avoiding the temptation to literary effect – offers the image of the head as ‘evidence’ of these qualities. Similarly, the serene stretch of white beach is always the site of attempts to keep order, while the tangle and sounds of the jungle are the outward manifestation of fears and savagery. It is not just in the rendering of the large concepts at the novel and the film’s heart that Brook shows his filmmaker’s skills. That idea of the screen’s capacity to provide ‘evidence’ is seen also in his command of revealing detail. The close-up of the small lizard which has attached itself to Simon’s shoulder and which he observes 11
reflectively is succeeded by a cut to a high overhead shot of a pig in a clearing, with the hunters poised to attack it. There is a brief moment in the morning after the death of Simon to the sound of ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ when Piggy casually pulls up his school socks, which seems like a tiny piece of evidence for his wish to maintain a vestige of order. It is echoed at the very end when the hunted Ralph fetches up at a pair of legs in long white socks, as if these are a sign of the everyday world in which grownups tell you what to do and keep things in bounds. In this control over the film’s imagery, in the cutting between the telling detail and the larger action, in the way in which Raymond Leppard’s score is sparingly used to contrast triumphal brass and its displacement by threatening drumbeats, in his insightful use of his young actors: in these and other matters, Brook shows himself a director sensitive to what the screen can do. And especially in how it might go about bringing a famous and very distinctive novel to the screen.
Assessment and Reception As an adaptation of Golding’s allegorical novel, Brook’s film sufficiently bears the marks of an imaginative filmmaker, as in some of the ways suggested above, not to be seen as merely a ‘faithful’ rendering of its masterly antecedent. The opening still images are a good example of how Brook stamps the film with his signature. Whereas Golding’s prose can reflect explicitly on states of mind, can articulate inner apprehensions, Brook’s explicitness lies in the choice of his images and how he underlines their significance through cinematic strategies such as editing and musical soundtrack. In this way, I’d say that he sometimes creates his own ‘magic’ (the uniformed choir’s first black scarring of the white stretch of beach?) as well as providing the ‘evidence’ which he says is the filmmaker’s trump card. As an adventure tale, it is too dark for tastes formed by the likes of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was inspired by a Disneyland ride rather than the idea of a civilisation in danger. But Brook’s film does offer a powerful sense of the 12
dangers of adventure, of the lust for power and, above all, of the sheer precariousness of the civilised values we claim to live by. If these boys, used to the quotidian demands of a predictable orderliness, can so readily succumb to the darkness within, the film suggests that we might, with Golding’s Ralph, also weep “for the loss of innocence.” [14] Though Brook’s version was critically much better received than the 1990 remake, it was not unequivocally praised. The British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin guardedly described it as an “extremely conscientious adaptation, which sticks so closely to the original that one is surprised to find it quite lacking in impetus and excitement,” arriving at the not very remarkable conclusion that “the written image is so very different from the filmed one.” [15] This writer seems to be quite unable to discern and value what Brook has actually achieved on screen and in screen terms. Peter Cowie in Films and Filming praised the film for “the sincerity of Brook’s adaptation of this terrifying fable”, found the ending with Ralph’s weeping “genuinely moving” but did feel that “the film’s overall impact is blurred…by the hesitant performance of many of the children” [16] The Sight and Sound reviewer was gripped by “its spiralling descent from normality into horror as the tropical paradise becomes a wild jungle, and the group of castaway schoolboys a tribe of howling savages”, though he felt that the film “never really clinches its nightmarish trap.” [17] The American critic, Judith Crist, however, listed it in her Year’s Ten Best for 1963, praising “the neat adventure-into-nightmare surface of Lord of the Flies translating into cinematic terms William Golding’s thought-provoking fable of the decivilisation of the young”, later referring to it as “superb”. [18] Whatever reservations reviewers had, the film was invariably more highly-regarded than the 1990 remake. Forty-odd years on, the world has arguably become a much more violent place and we may be less shocked at how near the surface of our civilisation the potential for horror and mayhem lies. But if we see Jack in the light of terrorists to whom laws are as nothing, if the upsurge in the casual, day-to-day violence sometimes makes World War Two seem well-managed by comparison, the film still looks ‘real’ and its modesty alongside contemporary blockbusters retains its power to shock. Perhaps this is partly the result of not showing everything in graphic detail and leaving our minds free to conjure up our own horrors.
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Conclusion Peter Brook never became a conventional film director. He remained a maverick in film as he did in theatre, and appeared only to be interested in challenging projects. His film of Peter Weiss’s extraordinary play, Marat/Sade [19] which Brook directed onstage is a prime example of a director ready to fly in the face of filmgoing and critical expectations. His Lord of the Flies and King Lear, starring Paul Scofield, have both acquired a kind of classic status, and they have certain key elements in common. Both are drawn to the idea of human nature reduced to its most basic impulses; both are concerned with the possibility of survival in a world where terrifying violence is only a step away, where those with power cannot be counted on to use it benignly. The great strength of his Lord of the Flies resides in the relentless fluency with which he allows symbolic intention to emerge from the actuality of plot and character. He offers us the drama of film, not a lecture or sermon, and alerts us – exposes us – to horrific possibilities.
Dr Brian McFarlane is Honorary Associate Professor, Monash University, and Visiting Professor (Film Studies), University of Hull, UK. He is editor and chief author of The Encyclopedia of British Film.
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NOTES 1. Having seen this electrifying production at the Aldwych Theatre, London, 1971, I have never since been able to take conventional interpretations of the play seriously. 2. Michael Kustow; Peter Brook; Bloomsbury Publishing, London; p.117. 3. Quoted in Peter Parker (ed.); A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel; Oxford University Press, New York; 1995, p.315. 4. In Margaret Drabble (ed); The Oxford Companion to English Literature; Oxford University Press, Oxford et al; 2000; p. 416. 5. M.H. Abrams; A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th edition (1981); Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York et al; 1957, p.4. 6. William Golding; Lord of the Flies (1954); Faber and Faber, London; 2004, p.216 7. Ibid, p. 2. 8. Kustow, p. 12. 9. Peter Brook; Threads of Time; Methuen, London; 1998, pp. 18-19. 10. Peter Brook; The Shifting Point; Harper & Row, New York; 1987; p. 193. 11. Kustow, p. 123. 12. The Shifting Point, p. 197. 13. Golding, p. 155. 14. Golding, p. 216. 15. “Lord of the Flies”; Monthly Film Bulletin; September 1964, p. 131. 16. Peter Cowie; “Lord of the Flies”; Films and Filming; August 1964, p. 21. 17. Tom Milne; “Lord of the Flies”; Sight and Sound; Autumn 1964, p. 195. 18. Judith Crist; reprinted in The Private Eye, the Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl; Paperback Library, New York; 1970, pp. 56-57, 243. 19. Full title: The Persecution and Assassination Of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed By The Inmates Of The Asylum Of Charenton Under The Direction Of The Marquis De Sade.
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