A NEW ADVENTURES AND RE:BOURNE PRODUCTION TEACHER AND STUDENT RESOURCE PACK LORD OF THE FLIES TEACHER AND STUDENT RESOURCE PACK 1 1. USING THIS RESOURCE PACK p3 2. WILLIAM GOLDING’S NOVEL p4 William Golding and Lord of the Flies Novel’s Plot Characters Themes and Symbols 3. NEW ADVENTURES AND RE:BOURNE’S LORD OF THE FLIES p11 An Introduction By Matthew Bourne Production Research Some Initial Ideas Plot Sections Similarities and Differences 4. PRODUCTION ELEMENTS p21 Set and Costume Costume Supervisor Music Lighting 5. PRACTICAL WORKSHEETS p26 General Notes Character Devising and Developing Movement 6. REFLECTING AND REVIEWING p32 Reviewing live performance Reviews and Editorials for New Adventures and Re:Bourne’s Production of Lord of the Flies 7. FURTHER WORK p32 Did You Know? It’s An Adventure Further Reading Essay Questions References Contributors LORD OF THE FLIES TEACHER AND STUDENT RESOURCE PACK 2 1. USING THIS RESOURCE PACK This pack aims to give teachers and students further understanding of New Adventures and Re:Bourne’s production of Lord of the Flies. It contains information and materials about the production that can be used as a stimulus for written work, discussion and practical activities. There are worksheets containing information and resources that can be used to help build your own lesson plans and schemes of work based on Lord of the Flies. This pack contains subject material for Dance, Drama, English, Design and Music. Discussion and/or Evaluation Ideas Research and/or Further Reading Activities Practical Tasks Written Work The symbols above are to guide you throughout this pack easily and will enable you to use this guide as a quick reference when required. They will appear through the pack as symbols highlighting further work that can be done. There are also a number of related activities, practical exercises and discussion ideas that can be used to develop ideas, workshops and as a starting point on which to use for your own course requirements. LORD OF THE FLIES TEACHER AND STUDENT RESOURCE PACK 3 2. WILLIAM GOLDING’S NOVEL William Golding and Lord of the Flies William Golding was born in Newquay, Cornwall, on 19 September 1911. He was nearly three at the outbreak of the First World War, and his childhood memories of that conflict were powerful. His father was a science teacher at the grammar school in the small Wiltshire town of Marlborough, and Golding and his brother were pupils there. Both became schoolteachers too. In Lord of the Flies, the severed pig’s head - the Lord of the Flies - speaks to Simon “in the voice of a schoolmaster”. Golding had often heard that voice, and he had produced it as well. He knew its ambiguity. As a child, Golding - always known as Bill or Billy - was imaginative, affectionate, musical and, it seems, pugnacious. He recounts in an autobiographical essay ‘Billy the Kid’ that he looked forward to going to school because it “was to bring me fights”. He finds that, surprisingly, the other boys don’t want to fight all the time. So he provokes them. But this incurs a cost: to his astonishment he realises “They don’t like me!” Leaving school in the summer of 1930, Golding went to ■ WILLIAM GOLDING Brasenose College, Oxford, to study natural sciences. The September 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World experience soon palled. Oxford seemed outrageously War, and their marriage lasted till his death. He wrote in his snobbish, and he became bored with the work. At school, journal of their happiness together; he believed that without science had been taught by his father, a gifted teacher, her he would not have written anything. who turned it into a string of wonderful stories. At Oxford, Golding found it boring and distasteful. Two years later, he A year after their marriage, their first child was born, a son. found the courage to tell his far-from-wealthy parents that Golding, the pugnacious Billy, now cared profoundly about he wanted to change to English. They generously agreed to the future of those he loved. Four months later, he went into fund Golding for two more years. He graduated with a good the navy. The war changed him forever. He saw much to blow degree. That October, 1934, Macmillan published a book of apart his father’s hopeful ideas of human advancement. He his poetry. He was 23. saw that humans did not just kill for survival; it was what they did by nature. For the next couple of years, Golding lived in London. He tried acting, playing the piano, writing and even - a His two years of science at Oxford took Golding out of last desperate measure - teaching. In 1937, he returned fighting and into a weapons-research establishment. to Oxford to get a teaching diploma. In the autumn of There, he saw how ingenious people became, and how far 1938, he took a job teaching English, drama and music the patriotic task removed people’s sense of the enemy’s at Maidstone Grammar School in Kent. He had absorbed humanity. He saw that intelligence and education did not his father’s socialism, and, despite hating the glibness impede this - quite the reverse. When he returned to active of some of the socialists he met, he stayed on the left, service, he himself fought with ruthlessness, daring and politically, for the rest of his life. In his journal he records skill, shelling the coast of France during the D-Day landings, that he had always voted Labour, though both his children and a few months later firing a barrage that flattened a remember him arguing fiercely with their left-wing ideas. Dutch coastal village. Afterwards, visiting his commanding He suspected that socialism was woefully simple when up officer in hospital, he found the wards full of Dutch civilians against human nature. he had injured. In April 1939, at a political meeting, he met a beautiful girl When the war finished, Golding returned to teaching in the - Ann Brookfield - and they fell in love. She was to remain Salisbury school he had left behind in 1940. He and Ann his closest companion, supporter and critic. They married in had a daughter as well as a son, and they led a busy life. But LORD OF THE FLIES TEACHER AND STUDENT RESOURCE PACK 4 despite these preoccupations the war would not let him The Novel’s Plot go. During the conflict he had read Homer’s Iliad, that great poetic account of another terrible war, the battle for Troy. The story is set on a fictitious tropical island in the Pacific Now he began to read Greek tragedy as well. Here he found Ocean during an evacuation of an unspecified nuclear war. A a world where life was not fair - where individuals were the British plane crashes leaving a group of boys aged between victims not only of fate but of their own natures. four and twelve the sole survivors. One evening in the early 1950s, the Goldings were reading At the start, Ralph and the reluctantly named Piggy are seen a bedtime story to their children. It was an adventure searching for the others when they come across a large shell story, a tale of well-behaved children on an island without or conch that can be blown like a trumpet. Ralph blows it adults. Golding told his wife that he could imagine a story and the rest of the other boys come in answer to the call of real children in that situation - they would certainly not including a group of choirboys led by head chorister Jack behave like that. She replied that Merridew. Ralph is chosen to be leader in preference to it was a marvellous idea, and he Jack, who is allowed to command his choir as hunters. Ralph should go ahead and write it. He asserts two primary goals: to have fun and to maintain a did, immediately, working with smoke signal that could alert passing ships to their presence astonishing speed, writing at odd on the island. The boys declare that whoever holds the conch moments, in the staffroom, on shall also be able to speak at their formal gatherings and buses, even - it is said - in lessons. receive the attentive silence of the larger group. The book was rejected by at least ten publishers until, in the autumn Jack organises his choir group into a hunting party responsible of 1953, a young editor at Faber for discovering a food source; Ralph, Jack, and a boy called took it off the reject pile, started named Simon soon form a loose troika of leaders. Though reading and was gripped. It he is Ralph’s only confidant, Piggy is quickly made an outcast was published a year later, in by his fellow “biguns” (older boys) and becomes an unwilling September 1954. Golding was 43. source of laughs for the other children. Simon, in addition to supervising the project of constructing shelters, feels an ■ ORIGINAL FABER PUBLICATION instinctive need to protect the “littluns” (younger boys). On the basis of this book, Golding was sometimes accused As time passes the boys become used to the island. Ralph of not liking children. That is quite untrue - he had what continues to worry about the smoke signal and Jack might be termed a realistic affection for them. He knew what becomes more and more focused on hunting. The semblance they could do, but he also knew what they needed. His own of order quickly deteriorates as the majority of the boys childhood had been spent under the guidance of kindly turn idle, giving little aid in building shelters, and begin to parents.