A Double Feature of Two One Act Plays performed back to back on the same evening. Two Plays, Two Directors - Lord of the Flies (directed by SIYT Artistic Director Jonathan Salt) presented as the first act with Bang! Bang! You're Dead directed by SIYT's Founder Member Tyler Mortimer. Tyler cut his directorial teeth as Jonathan's Assistant Director of Vision.

Performed in the Black Theatre, Burgess Hall St. Ives in March 2010.

"Lord of the Flies" is Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding's tale of a group of school children on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results. It's core discussion of how culture created by man fails has maintained it's place as a controversial and challenging piece.

Rehearsals

Lord of the Flies was written during the first years of the Cold War atomic age the events seem to arise in the midst of World War II. The children whose actions form the superficial subject of the book are from a school in Britain. Some are ordinary students, while others, arrive as an already-coherent body under an established leader; so does, for example, the choir. The book portrays their descent into savagery, contrasting with other books that had lauded the inevitable ascendancy of a higher form of human nature, as in Two Years Vacation, published by Jules Verne in 1888. Left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state.

At an allegorical level, the central theme is the conflicting impulses toward civilization—live by rules, peacefully and in harmony—and towards the will to power. Different subjects include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, forms a major subtext of Lord of the Flies. Many of these themes were controversial at the time of the book's publication.

The "Das Bus" episode of The Simpsons is also based on this book. The episode Kamp Krusty has several elements from Lord of the Flies as well (a pig's head on a spear, kids using primitive weapons and wearing war paint and a burning effigy). The TV Series Lost draws many of its initial plot devices and themes from Lord of the Flies, most notably being based around a plane crash on a desert island, the existence of a 'beast' and the emerging tensions between two leaders, one of whom happens to be named "Jack". The overweight Hurley occasionally serves as the voice of reason, much like the novel's Piggy.

Performance