[0:00]My name is Max and I'm the designer on Lord of the Flies at Leeds Playhouse.
[0:08]We've set the play in the modern day, but we've been very true to the book in the sense that it's a tropical desert island.
[0:17]We've given the design a very distinct color palette, which is black, white, and then the introduction of red throughout the piece. And it's a world in which we see the sort of jungle of this island and the kind of darkness that that holds, and the way in which lots of the fears that play out come out of that space.
[0:36]We were keen partly for the design to have a very kind of high contrast feel, particularly for visually impaired audiences, so that it's really clear and easy to identify where things are. And we wanted it to feel naturalistic, but at the same time abstract. So we have palm trees that look and feel like real palm trees, but they're completely black in color and they've got this kind of shiny, oily kind of texture to them. So everything feels slightly off in the sense that at the beginning you might feel like it could be a kind of paradise. And actually as the play unfolds, we see that it it can also be a kind of dystopian terrifying environment as well. There are some really key iconic images from the book Lord of the Flies, which many people who come to see the show will know. The conscience is a very famous image, and that needs to be destroyed as well. So we've had to find a way to have um enough consciences that we can destroy one per performance. And we have a wild bore that is caught and killed by by the children on the island, and the head of that bore is also famously where the title Lord of the Flies comes from. We see that rot, we see the passing of time and the decay of that head. So we've there's been a kind of long journey on the prop make of this wild bore, how naturalistic it is. Ours is uh in the world of our color scheme, so it's a completely black and white animal. And it feels very other in relation to the people. We have fire as well, there's lots of elemental aspects and we've decided to not portray those naturalistically. So lots of those kind of images are finding their way in in a slightly more abstract way than you would expect in a film or in the in the book. I'm really excited to see our palm trees come to life on stage. These really tall, abstractly shaped constructions have a kind of creepy beauty to them, I think. So I think they're going to make the quarry feel like a completely different environment to how it would normally feel as a theater.
