When Canberra Rep announced that co-directors Lachlan Houen and Caitlin Baker were “making their directorial debut on the Rep stage” with the coming production of Lord of the Flies, one got the impression that they were novices – they’re not. 

Both have been around the theatrical traps for some years. In 2023 alone, Baker staged Joanna Richards’s new philosophical thriller, You Can’t Tell Anyone, at The Courtyard Studio for Canberra Youth Theatre and Houen co-directed the post-electric-post-apocalyptic Simpsons spoof, Mr Burns, for NUTS, packing them in at the ANU. 

Both have been deeply involved as participants and workers at Canberra Youth Theatre. 

When I catch up with them, they’ve just completed blocking Lord of the Flies. They’re doing Nigel Williams’ popular adaptation of the novel, which they point out is 70 years old this year.

Readers will mostly know what happens in Lord of the Flies, and it’s not pretty. A group of 11 young British school boys are stranded on an island and forced to establish a new society for themselves. 

But far from displaying the noblest of human passions, they quickly divide into factions and social classes, like the hunters and the beach boys.

Some, like Jack, quickly revert to savagery. Others, like Ralph and the clever Piggy, try to structure a workable society within their limited understanding. But outside in the forest, the sense of an intangible beast lurks. Could it be their own nature?

Adaptor Williams follows Nobel Laureate William Golding’s plot pretty much as written, dividing the action into three acts built around three main events.

But theatre is very different from written narrative and in what could be a controversial decision, Baker and Houen have decided to cast colourblind, sort of.

This means that the more sensitive, sacrificial characters, the wise Piggy and the innocent Simon, will be played by female actors acting as boys, while the more aggressive characters, Jack and the hunters, will be played by boys as boys.

Caught in the middle is Ralph, the conflicted protagonist who doesn’t always want to be the protagonist and who weeps for the end of innocence. He will be played by a male.

But are girls likely to behave better than boys in such circumstances? “The best people to talk about privileged young men are women,” Baker quotes.

Oddly enough, they both tell me, there’s only one woman ever mentioned in Golding’s text and that’s Piggy’s aunt.

It was an open casting process at Rep, but the play holds its challenges, because even Williams’ version can be done with just adult actors delineating the subconscious power structures that emerge. 

But Baker and Houen see the play as “a call to arms for people to take both the art and arguments of young people seriously – it’s a parable about young people reckoning with the fact that violence is more often than not taught.”

For this reason, they preferred to open up to young actors, whose life experience could reflect those of the boys in the play, so the maximum age will be 23 years.

Houen would rather like to fill the Rep stage with sand but that’s a decision for two very seasoned designers, Michael Sparks and Russell Brown, who will understand the necessary contingencies.

It’s a famous novel and no-one for a minute thinks it has dated; far from it.

Baker and Houen should have the last word: “In an era where democracy seems increasingly fragile, what better text is there than Lord of the Flies to ask that we look our past in the face and realise it’s a mirror?”

Lord of the Flies, Canberra Rep Theatre July 25-August 10.