Recontextualised

If you've ever walked out of a classic play and wondered why you bothered, you're not alone. Keeping things relevant and incisive when you're dealing with a decades-old text takes thought – something that director Kip Williams knows all about. “If you're going to restage an old work, the question is, how much are you having a conversation about your own society's politics?” Williams suggests. “More often than not, the way in which classics are dealt with by theatremakers... fails to deal with the fact that the writing was constructed in a time that had gender and sexual politics which are often somewhat repugnant, compared to those that we aspire to today. It is the theatremaker's responsibility to recognise that, and to address it in some way.”

No one could accuse Williams – who is Resident Director at the Sydney Theatre Company – of failing to think about gender politics in his own new show, a production of Lord Of The Flies that features an all-female cast. Based on William Golding's famous novel about a group of boys who are stranded on an island and go feral in the worst way possible, the characters in the play remain boys, despite being portrayed by female actors. “There is certainly a fruitful tension between the gender of the actors and the gender of the characters,” Williams says, with possible understatement.

Well-educated and seemingly civilised at the story's outset, the power dynamics of the group play out in a way that shows many of the boys to be brutal, superstitious and eventually murderous. Seen as a masterpiece of 20th century literature, the novel is often perceived as a comment on the innate savagery of human nature. It's an interpretation Williams is keen to interrogate. “Everybody who spoke to me about the story would mention how it was just an extraordinary story of humanity, and how it was one of the great myths to emerge from the 20th century, for what it says about the dark strain of human behaviour. And while there's a lot of legitimacy in the way that the story is thought about, what people would never bring up was that all the characters in the story were male.”

Williams perceives many of the boys' actions as tied to their indoctrination into masculine culture. In casting women actors he wanted to investigate the extent to which the boys' behaviour really was 'natural'. “I've been drawn to the tension in the story between the performance of masculinity and those behaviours which are slightly more authentic, and less performed.” Watching the female performers enact scenes of power-play, violence and intimidation evokes a medley of responses, he says. “There is a kind of potent message about the capacity for us to allow ourselves to see women as physically dominant and powerful. At the same time however, that kind of behaviour is really problematic... In a sense there is a kind of affirmation of the capacity for more than just men to behave in this way.”

WHAT: Lord Of The Flies
WHEN & WHERE: Friday 28 June to Sunday 14 July, Helium, Malthouse Tower Theatre VIC