I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Storybook Theater’s rendition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I walked out of the theater with a single collective emotion: horror. The audience was able to journey with the characters through their spiral into insanity and with the close proximity of the actors to the audience, it was not a stretch to see ourselves in the places of the boys.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the premise of the story, The Lord of the Flies follows the story of a group of British private school boys after they were stranded on a deserted island when their plane crashed. The boys form two groups: the military/hunting group lead by Jack and the shelter-building leadership group lead by Ralph. Initially the plan and division of power works out well but savagery and the desire for power strains the relationships between the boys. Insanity and the obsession with the hunt causes them to mistake one of their friends as a monster and they all brutally kill the boy. Jack uses the idea that the monsters are within us all to justify the killing and to continue to pursue the murder Ralph in effort to achieve ultimate power.
The creepy minimalist scenery is used to establish the effect of isolation and the exposure of the characters. A lot of foreshadowing is used throughout the play to begin to cue us into the final conclusion/moral the story leads us to. Some key quotations are:
Piggy: It’s the beast.
Ralph: It’s us.
Piggy: It’s them.
This was a chilling scene in the play where Piggy first draws the line between Jack’s group and Ralph’s. Piggy is Ralph’s second in command and is characterized by blame shifting. After the murder of Simon, he instructs Ralph to look away. While this seems horrifying in the context of the story, it happens every day in our lives. We don’t look in the eye of the problems our world faces and rather choose to turn off the TV or walk past the homeless person. We all do it.
Simon: The beast is a man.
Simon is a disabled boy who suffers from seizures. He is ironically the most aware of what is going on between the interaction of the boys. His line foreshadows his own death to come as it’s not an animal that kills him but rather his own friends. It alludes to a similar theme throughout human history where we put to death the most enlightened and revolutionary of minds when we should be listening.
Jack: It was just a game.
When the boys are finally rescued after nearly killing themselves with an out of control fire, Jack laughs off the fact that they are all covered in blood and about to kill Ralph. It is here the boys realize the true horror of what has occurred.
At the end of the day the reality is, there is no beast but the beast inside of us. It poses the horrifying question of what does it mean to be human and whether humanity is always associated with it.
For it’s only when we look at ourselves in the mirror and see the monster within ourselves that we can conquer it.