However, what happens when a character is the creation of another’s mind? Amy exists as an individual entity in the characters’ world in Flies with Honey. However, she is presented to the audience as a projection of Anna’s guilt and thus her characterisation is constructed on how Anna views Amy rather than Amy being someone with autonomous choices and actions. Such issues arise and are confronted in other theatrical texts.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character accumulates guilt throughout the Acts by partaking in a revenge plot that is kick-started by an apparition of his murdered father. In Spring Awakening (I decided to focus on the musical adaptation by Sheik and Sater), Melchior is talked out of committing suicide by apparitions of his friends whose deaths can be somewhat attributed to his actions. Such examples highlight the ideology of the Theatre of Guilt where the protagonist places guilt on everyone else and whose arc is complete when they accept this guilt as their own (Brustein 383). Psychologist Martin Buber states that “man is the being who is capable of becoming guilty and is capable of illuminating his guilt” (209). Theatre is a way of taking this realisation a step further. Therefore, although she is unaware of it, I intended Anna to use her imagining
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After all, “storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth” (McKee, Story 113) and the truth does not have to be a death sentence. Buber sees reconciliation as “acknowledg[ing] […] existential guilt” and “overcom[ing] the consequences of [this] guilty action” (210). In Flies with Honey, I intended to present the audience with a narrative of a young girl whose actions are stimulated by her emotions. I wanted to show how she begins to accept and atone for these actions, and leave it up to the audience to decide whether they are going to forgive her or