Like countless young people, I studied William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies at high school. It had a profound effect on me. Decades later I have never forgotten a moving quote from the end of the book: “…Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

Reading it again now, the book – which focuses on a group of privileged British school boys stranded on an isolated island when their plane crashes during a wartime evacuation – still has the same force: the inexorable building of tension as the division between Ralph and the envious, disruptive Jack grows, Ralph’s struggle to try and keep the boys working together and the fire alight so that passing ships might see them, the gradual descent into anarchy, and the heart-breaking loss from the savagery that ensues.

Little of that power, tension, shock and poignancy makes it to the stage in Kip Williams’s production for Sydney Theatre Company, which uses an adaptation by English playwright Nigel Williams, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England in 1995.

The cast...