the representation of Evil according to Peter Brook- Corriere.it

In 1954, the English writer and poet William Golding (awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983) made his debut in fiction with a novel immediately kissed by a sensational and unrepeatable success: “Lord of the Flies / Lord of the Flies”. Published by Faber & Faber, a publishing house directed by Thomas Stearns Eliot, the book had long had the working title “Strangers from Within”; but it was Eliot himself who suggested to Golding to change it with a more suggestive one that more explicitly declared the satanic metaphor hidden in the pages of the work.

In many, after publication, tried to make a cinematographic transposition: the great theater director Peter Brook won, whose only films previously made had been the more “simple” “Il Masnadiero/The Beggar’s Opera” (1953) and the adaptation of a novel by Marguerite Duras: “Moderato Cantabile – Story of a strange love” (1960). For Brook, “Lord of the Flies” represented a double challenge: on the one hand, due to the difficulty of rendering the chilling and visionary atmospheres of the literary model without betraying them, which explored both the fragility and the dualism of human nature, emphasizing its characteristic of apologue on birth of totalitarianisms; on the other, for the radical decision to shoot exclusively on location on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and with a cast made up exclusively of non-professional children. The result was a work that still today resembles nothing else and which was previewed on May 12, 1963 at the Cannes Film Festival and then distributed (not without difficulty: in England its rawness was the cause of a very heavy ban on minors , while in Italy it made its first official appearance in theaters only fourteen years later, in 1977) that same summer.

“Lord of the Flies” is set in a dystopian 1984, while a global thermonuclear conflict is underway. When, in the midst of a storm, a plane carrying a group of English boys made up of students and young choristers rescued from the brutality of war crashes on a deserted island, only two of them initially seem to have survived: the sensitive Ralph (James Aubrey ) and the bespectacled “Bombolo” [in originale “Piggy”] (Hugh Edwards). However, the two are soon joined by many other survivors of the disaster, such as the twins Sam and Eric (David and Simon Surtees), and the more restless Jack (Tom Chapin) and Simon (Tom Gaman). While the group organizes itself to survive by dividing into two teams led respectively by Ralph and Jack, the hallucinatory Simon becomes convinced of the existence of a dangerous creeping “beast” that could be hiding in the most remote recesses of the island. And meanwhile the group, which has tried to govern itself with precise rules without any control of an adult authority, gradually begins to regress to an increasingly primitive human stage. As non-rational ancestral fears emerge, the two teams split for good after Ralph accuses Jack of deliberately putting out a fire that could have signaled their presence to a passing aircraft that could have located them; and when Jack decides to organize a ritual in favor of the “beast” by offering it the skull of a pig teeming with insects stuck on a stick planted in the ground (the “lord of the flies” of the title, or the biblical Beelzebub), the situation degenerates definitely. And Simon will pay dearly for the decision to venture into the rocks where he believes the entity lurks.

Out of respect for those who are not aware of the evolution of the events narrated, it is advisable to stop a step before the developments that will lead to the dramatic epilogue, son of the famous conviction of Golding (and Brook) that “man produces evil like bees produce honey”. “Lord of the Flies”, on balance, is nothing more than this: a pessimistic and desperate reflection on the possibilities of social collaboration between human beings, exacerbated by the very bitter idea of ​​putting at the center of the narrative a group of future adults already heavily informed by the limits and contradictions of a “democratic” model that is difficult to implement in purity. Where the long-distance harmonic vision is overwhelmed by the identification of a present that obscures rationality and in which the evil of individuals gets the better of the very idea of ​​the community. Brook and Golding adapted the novel for four hands, reducing the time of the action and eliminating some details (such as the pig’s head that “talks” to Simon) in favor of greater dryness (and crudeness). In fact, their goal was to further simplify the matter in order to symbolically isolate that gap of reason which potentially, and metaphorically, is at the basis of the birth of totalitarianisms: and the key character of the story is in fact the young Jack, who lead to committing a crime that is as cruel as it is unexpected and casual, placing it in a sort of leadership position in an illusory collective acquiescence.

This rigidly thesis setting however, it is also the most evident limit of the film, despite part of the contemporary critics making the notes not so much in terms of exhibited programmatic nature as, more superficially, on that of the spectacular endurance and the scarce effectiveness of the too inexperienced young actors (in any case chosen after a casting of three thousand applicants). Seen today, however, the film still works and above all precisely because of this alleged “defect”: and the often really hesitant and uncertain contributions of the novice protagonists end up accentuating its characteristics of rough expressionism. Because even if Brook’s initial approach was openly to apply the stylistic elements of documentary narration to matter, the final result, with its allegories and its lyrical and mocking glimpses (as in the memorable sequence in which the group led by Jack marches on the beach intoning a Kyrie Eleison that becomes a terrifying omen of corruption) undoubtedly pertains to that suspension/dispersion of central and fundamental realism in the most acute (and pure, and “political”) “genre” cinema.