Before delving into this gruesomely enjoyable thriller in which Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams respectively play the bullying boss of an international corporation and his meek subordinate, it is worth looking looking at some of the role-swapping plots of the past, especially those set on a remote island.
The most obvious is JM Barrie’s 1902 play The Admirable Crichton (later made into the 1957 movie starring Kenneth More) in which a shipwrecked aristocratic family and their butler discover that in the real world of uninhabited tropical islands the servant is king.
But it was the Jewish-German playwright Ludwig Fulda who first imagined the dramatic potential of upending the social order on an uninhibited island, an idea that came from playwright’s interest in socially engaged plays. In fact, so similar was Fulda’s play Robinson’s Eiland to Barrie’s, many people wondered if the father of Peter Pan had plagiarised Fulda’s work.
Whatever the truth, Barrie went on to great acclaim and success while Fulda, a greatly respected poet and dramatist who was also Germany’s first President of PEN, killed himself in 1939 with the Nazis closing in after America refused him asylum.
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