In a sense this is home ground for Williams – his 1977 stage debut Class Enemy about a

In a sense, this is home ground for Williams – his 1977 stage debut, Class Enemy, about a group of alienated, aimlessly vicious youths in an inner-city comprehensive, could be read as an urban rewrite of Golding’s story; and his novels of suburban homicide touch on the same theme of dark, savage emotions lurking underneath a veneer of civilisation. Indeed, it could quite easily be literally true of the middle-class schoolboys here that they came from SW19.Sitting in front of the elegant bleached wood and white sand of Chris Dyer’s set at the Other Place, you soon realise that in Williams’s case practice hasn’t made perfect. What’s been added in this translation is a lot of superfluous detail – the boys start playing status games about which school they went to (the cast-list even divides them up according to fictional school), and arguing about which is better at rugby. The point seems to be, not that there’s a beast inside every child, but that there’s a beast inside every rugby-playing English public schoolboy; and while you wouldn’t argue with that line of thinking, it’s a far narrower, weaker point than Golding made. And it dissipates much of the tension the drama ought to have.There are other peculiar touches: Ralph (Daniel Brocklebank) is written as far more thoughtful, far weaker than in the book; Jack (an impressive Marc Elliot) seems to be a hard man of the right, obsessed with proper pronunciation and the need to devote resources to weapons.

Elijah Moshinsky’s production looks beautiful, and he’s got some marvellous performances from his schoolboy cast; you’d love to see them with a better script. As it stands, it’s a frustrating affair.’Miser’: Chichester, 01243 781312 ‘Robbers’: Gate, 0171 229 0706 ‘Lord of the Flies’: Stratford Other Place, 01789 295623.. I ONCE watched a ballet critic sleep through Romeo and Juliet. Periodically, cues in Prokofiev’s score would nudge him into consciousness for one of Kenneth MacMillan’s sexy, acrobatic pas de deux, then he would slither back into slumber for the ensembles.

With Rudolf Nureyev’s 1977 production, danced in London last week by the English National Ballet, you find yourself doing the reverse. Nureyev’s version was clearly designed to eliminate any long- ueurs, and the result is a ballet packed with incident. The crowd scenes show an understanding of the workaday hatreds that give rise to mob violence, as bravado and bad manners escalate to a punch-up. As in all of Nureyev’s productions, the male roles are enhanced and expanded, and all of the minor characters are vividly drawn: Juliet’s bawdy, bosomy nurse spends her leisure hours being felt up by page boys.