Review: Jack Thorne's 'Lord of the Flies' is a timely, engrossing miniseries true to novel

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Jack Thorne, who co-wrote last year’s prize-winning “Adolescence,” returns with another story of fractured childhood with an admirable, engrossing new adaptation of William Golding’s much-taught novel of boy castaways, “The Lord of the Flies.” (Not to be confused with “The Lord of the Rings,” though I keep typing that by mistake.)Published in 1954, Golding’s book has an unstated Cold War backdrop — there is passing reference to an atom bomb and “the Reds,” and an old-fashioned animated atom glimpsed through static at the head of the series.The boys, who are British and range in age from 6 to 12, are being evacuated to somewhere — none of them really knows, and it’s not clear anyone else does, either — when their plane goes down on an uncharted desert isle.

(The logo on the aircraft is Corinthian Air, make of that what you will.)The great British stage and screen director Peter Brook (“Marat/Sade,” “The Mahabharata”) filmed a version in 1961 (released in 1963) that somehow found its way onto American broadcast television in my youth that disturbs me still.A coed Filipino version was made in 1975, and a prosaic Americanized take in 1990.

In some way Brook’s powerful film, shot in black and white, still feels definitive, even after watching this new series, premiering Monday on Netflix, though it’s a streamlined telling and much of the dialogue was improvised.Our main characters are older boys Ralph (Winston Sawyers), Piggy (David McKenna), Jack (Lox Pratt) and Simon (Ike Talbut).Each has an episode named for him — as with “Adolescence” it’s a four-part show — the overlaid shifting focus fitting quite well into the novel’s chronology.

Ralph is good-hearted and reasonable and about to grow up; Piggy, chubby, bespectacled, asthmatic, stands for mocked intelligence; Jack, increasingly Ralph’s nemesis, is a budding authoritarian...