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Flies With Honey Guilty

Decent Essays

The “critical function of drama”, so Robert Brustein tell us, “is to arouse the remorse of ‘guilty creatures’” (382). In Flies with Honey, the underlining theme is guilt: not only Anna’s compunction over potentially murdering the girl she is in love with, but also her guilt for having these feelings of love in the first place. This is intended to be portrayed not only through dialogue but having Amy, the alleged-murder victim, appear as a manifestation of the protagonist’s guilt. In order to present this successfully, I had to understand what it means to write of guilt feelings for the stage and how such structure can affect characters and their authenticity. I also had to explore how this medium can be realised in musical theatre.

In very broad terms, there exist two types of plot: one that is driven by action, and one that is driven by characters (Alderson). Because my stageplay is only fifteen or so pages long and takes place in one location, it allowed itself to be more character based. However, writing for theatre also brings the audience into what Martin Meisel calls the “present progressive”, which he defines as a state of time which allows viewers to begin “in the midst of things, responsive to what is happening now, with questions […] [about] how are [they] going to get from here to there” …show more content…

They quote John Truby in saying that “the single biggest mistake writers can make when creating the characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate individuals” (73). While writing for film can be different from writing for theatre, this issue still needs to be addressed. The audience will not interest themselves with the journey of the character if the other characters are not also concerned with what has influenced this

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