The Bermuda Festival offering of 'Lord of the Flies' was a grim and disturbing play about the savagery of man.

Anyone who claims to have read 'Lord of the Flies' in school and enjoyed it is a fraud. Nobody reads this book and enjoys it at any age, and the same could probably be said about watching the play.

Yet, it is a story worth knowing because it is so thought provoking. And it is doubtful that Nobel Prize winning author William Golding ever meant 'Lord of the Flies' to be pleasurable. It is meant to be a scathing commentary about the nature of man, leadership and morality, among other things.

This version of 'Lord of the Flies' was performed by the Pilot Theatre, an award winning National Touring Theatre Company based at York Theatre Royal, in England.

It is about a group of boys that crash on a tropical island after an unnamed war. All the grown-ups on the plane are dead and the boys are left to their own devices.

Two boys quickly emerge as rival leaders, Jack Merridew (performed by Mark Knightley) the choir prefect, and Ralph (Davood Ghadami). Their approaches to their newfound leadership might be summed up as brawn verses brains. Blood lust quickly takes over Jack as he begins to hunt for food. Ralph, on the other hand, tries to maintain rationality and works to keep a signal fire alight.

Other important characters include Piggy (Dominic Doughty), who is the fat, whiny kid with glasses and no self-preservation who is teased in every classroom on this planet. Simon (Tony Hasnath) is a shaman sort of character who says weird but true things always at the wrong time. He's the kid who is usually next in line after Piggy to have his head dunked in the toilet by the Jacks of the world.

In the play, Piggy constantly urges civility and normalcy. He wants to hold meetings and create rules.

Both Piggy and Simon end up dead before the night is over. Piggy not-so-accidentally falls to his death, and Simon is not-so-accidentally trampled to death by the other boys which include Roger (Lachlan McCall), Maurice (Elliot Quinn), and twins Eric (Ben Sewell) and Sam (Michael Sewell).

The boys fear a beast they think is roaming the forest, but it is really the beast within themselves that holds the greatest threat to them.

"Sometimes the beast takes the shape of a human," said Jack shortly before violence erupts. "Sometimes it is in the shape of a little boy".

The set for the play was simple but effective, the wreckage of an airplane torn in two, and the beastie which is really the body of a fallen airman swinging in the trees, caught there by his parachute. A screen at the back of the stage portrays the environment, raging ocean or palm trees whipping in the wind.

The Pilot Theatre/York Theatre Royal is a well-established theatre company in England. They have been performing inspirational plays for about 25 years, and it showed in the top-notch level of acting on this night.

What stood out was the choreography. So much about the play is delivered through action rather than monologue or dialogue. At the beginning of the play, when the plane is crashing, the boys bump, and leap all over the plane as though being thrown about. Throughout the play, the boys casually scampered about the wreckage, at times hanging upside down from it by their feet. They fought, hunted and danced. All of the actors were highly muscular except for Dominic Doughty who played Piggy. (At least so it appeared.)

However, according to the programme, this was a play didn't come with a choreographer, but instead a movement director (Hannah Priddle) and a fight director (Philip D'Orleans).

It is understood that the Bermuda Festival chose this play because it is being studied in secondary schools this year. I think this is a good idea for those reading the book to also see the play or one of the movie adaptations that are available.

The book was heavy going for me when I read it in school as a 15-year-old. There were parts of it I did not fully understand until seeing the play.

The Bermuda Festival advised parental discretion for children under 11. This is somewhat ironic. Kids live some level of 'Lord of the Flies' every day on the playground.

As an adult you can also see these characters and behaviours reflected so frequently in every day life. In popular culture alone, there are many television shows that seem influenced by Golding's book including 'Lost', 'Survivor' and 'The Weakest Link' to name just a few. And when the play ended almost immediately people leaving the theatre began to apply the book to current politics.