“Shoe Horn Sonata is an impressive story of courage, hope, horror and friendship. This play is a tribute to commemorate the bravery of the women and to make their story of survival widely known. The historical context that the story has enables us to learn about the past events and to understand the true meaning of war and its consequences. The play draws on real events, the Massacre of the 21 Australian Nurses on BankaIsland with only one Survivor.
The focus for our study of “The Shoe Horn Sonata” is distinctively visual. This resource contains many visual images similar to images that could be used in a production of the play. Also there are several YouTube links which contain the music referred to in the play. Hover you mouse pointer over the link and follow the instructions that appear to access the link.
Making drama out of reality
John Misto, a well-known writer of documentaries, did not wish to present the story of the imprisoned Australian nurses as a documentary, but as a drama. He had to craft the story so as to manipulate the emotions of his audience, and to keep their interest to the end. Out of so much material, he had to make a deliberate choice, to achieve a narrative arc with elements of suspense, surprise, confrontation and a final resolution. There had to be tension to grip the audience.
The basic story is a grim one of a fight for survival, and of the traumatic consequences of such suffering to the victims’ later lives. To hold an audience. however, he needed to have elements of humour. Misto found that humour and music were two of the main ways the nurses and their fellow internees helped themselves to survive. Another was strong supportive friendships, based on the Australian value of mateship. All these elements Misto used in his playscript.
To care about the fate of the nurses, the audience has to come to know them and feel empathy for them.
The play uses language effectively to engage the audience e.g. descriptive detail in the monologues, imagery e.g. “on four wobbly legs we walk down to the village”; this provides a visual image of the scene and the efforts of both Sheila and Bridie.
Resources
Misto has written this play for the requirements of contemporary theatrical productions.
The Shoe-Horn Sonata, with only two characters on stage and an off-stage ‘voice’, is an attractive script for a professional theatre to produce, and it has been seen in a number of productions in Australian cities and in London.
It requires only two sets: a rudimentary television studio, indicated by the “On Air” sign
and a microphone, and a hotel room, with a bed and mini bar. Misto keeps the play affordable for theatre by casting only two actors, and using a simple set. Minimal props are needed, including
a suitcase,
the shoe-horn,
some photographs and embroidery.
Keeping the audience interested
Misto keeps the audience entertained and interested for the whole performance while they are watching only two characters on stage. He does this by using a wide variety of modern dramatic techniques.
Misto writes extensively for television and in this stage play he has used his familiarity with the use of photographicimages and voice-over to support the actors’ dialogue. He also uses the power of music to support his script. The images and music provide constantly changing focuses for the audience’s attention. They support the highly emotional material that surfaces from the memories of the central characters.
(Pre War Singapore)
The use of song and of instrumental music has several purposes. First, it shows in actuality to the audience the soothing and uplifting power of music. Music was a crucial feature of the ‘life support’ system in the camps. It also adds variety and emotional sub-text to many of the play’s scenes. It places them also in their historical context. On some occasions it suggests the irony of the situations the two women faced.
(The Vyner Brooke)
No photographs exist of these women in the prison camps, but a wide variety of other images appear on screen as background to the dialogue.
(Australian Army Nurse)
These include:
- photographs taken of male P.O.W.s when they were liberated
- photographs of the nurses arriving in Singapore from Belalau
- contrasting images of Singapore: the affluent, confident imperial city before its fall,
(Australian and British Soldiers captured by the Japanese)
and the bombed and burning city afterwards…
- the famous scenes of crowds in Martin Place, Sydney, when the war was declared over [while the audience knows the women in Belalau were still prisoners, destined for death]
Misto incorporates the contrasts of slides of the evacuation of the women and children from Singapore to show panic and fear when compared to the peaceful and happy slides of the women before they went to war. He also incorporates the contrasts of nostalgic music of the 1940’s to show life before the war where as when compared to the music played “Fall in Brother”, it has an up beat tempo that reveals the anticipation in which the men join into the war effort. Through the use of contrasts it provides a striking experience for the audience as both positive and negative aspects of the story are portrayed.
Credibility
Such images are credibly part of the script because the central situation Misto sets up is the making of a television documentary. The unseen presenter-interviewer, Rick, has brought together to share their experiences a group of women survivors of the camps. It is credible that the producer of such a program will have done extensive research and assembled an archive of images.
WW2 Navy LIFEJACKET
Sometimes as backing to the photographic images, at other times to support some of the women’s spoken memories, Misto uses excerpts from more than a dozen songs from the period, and such orchestral items as The BlueDanube Waltz and Danny Boy. Particularly moving for the two characters and for the audience is the recreation of the Captives’ Hymn, written in the camp by Margaret Dryburgh and sung every Sunday by the women, and the playing of Ravel’s Bolero, one of the items the voice orchestra presented at camp concerts.
Bolero
PRISONER OF WAR CAMPLATRINES
Glenn Miller Orchestra - Danny Boy
There is a range of sounds that establish the reality of the past - the singing of the crickets or the lapping of the waves. Misto uses flashbacks to convey the drama that is conveyed within the story e.g. “lapping waves” convey the fear and terror of being lost at sea. This helps significantly to portray the themes within the play of horror, courage, hope and emotional impact of characters. Though there is doom and gloom there still is humour and hope. Misto maintains a balance of this within the play e.g. hope by being in a choir that made a “glorious sound that rose above the camp “allowing the women to forget about the Jap’s and their hunger.
The male voice of Rick adds variety to the sound texture of the play. The use of spotlights, linking the use of harsh lighting by the prison guards and the strong lighting of the television studio, is another effective dramatic technique used.
The action of the play moves between the television studio where recollections of the past are fairly formally presented by the women as Rick interviews them, and the hotel, where the tensions between them appear in their outwardly casual conversations and are eventually resolved. This resolution is eventually made public in the cathartic last interview.
Making it bearable
A major problem that Misto faced, is how to make bearable for a modern audience a play about suffering, cruelty, deprivation and death. This same problem has been faced by writers and filmmakers dealing with such overwhelming tragedies as the Nazi holocaust.
(Holocaust Survivors)
Humour is used, as indeed many victims have used it , as a defence mechanism against despair and hopelessness. We see this when the Prime Minister’s message finally reaches the Australian nurses: “Keep smiling!” and, facing death in appalling conditions, their reaction is to break up in helpless laughter at the irony of the message. The contrast between the prim British schoolgirl Sheila, and the more practical Sydney nurse Bridie provides another source of humour.
When You’re Smiling
The other method used is the device of distancing. The characters and their audience are distanced in time from the events recalled and presented in the play. The women in the play have not only survived the camps, they have lived through the subsequent years and have in some ways dealt with the trauma. Now as survivors they can look back.
Misto makes no attempt to reproduce on stage the appalling brutalities carried out in the camps. We the audience do not see the rotten food or the beatings or the women left to die on the forced marches. We do not see the graves or the grave-diggers. Instead Misto presents these as reports remembered by Bridie and Sheila.
He treats them as the classical Greek dramatists did: as ‘obscene’ --literally to be ‘off-stage’-- and therefore reported to the audience in eloquent words, not shown. The Shoe-HornSonata uses words, reinforced with pictures and music, to establish these horrors in the imaginations of the audience.
Structure and characterisation
The structure of the play
The Shoe-Horn Sonata is divided into two acts: the longer Act One, with eight scenes, and a shorter Act Two, with six scenes.
It follows theatrical custom by providing a major climax before the final curtain of Act One, which resolves some of the suspense and mystery, but leaves the audience to wonder what direction the play will take after the interval. The action cuts between two settings: a television studio and a Melbourne motel room.
Tension creates drama. There is also the contrasts of the TV studio and the motel room, where In the motel room we see the build up of tension between Bridie and Sheila is on edge and picky. Bridie says “we shouldn’t be wasting our time together fighting we never did in camp”. Unlike the studio where the women are both forced to open up about their horrific experiences the motel room provides a deeper insight into the emotional impact that the separation has impacted upon them through the years. The action of the play moves between the television studio where recollections of the past are fairly formally presented by the women as Rick interviews them, and the hotel, where the tensions between them appear in their outwardly casual conversations and are eventually resolved. The Motel Room was also a place where private revelation and growing tension between Bridie and Sheila took place.
The opening scene, with Bridie demonstrating the deep, subservient bow, the kow-tow, demanded of the prisoners by their Japanese guards during tenko, takes the audience straight into the action. As the interviewer, Rick, poses questions, music and images from the war period flash on the screen behind Bridie, and the audience realises they are watching the filming of a television documentary. The time is now, and Bridie is being asked to recall the events of fifty years earlier.
Rule Brittania
This scene establishes who Bridie is, and introduces the audience to the situation: the recall and in a sense the re-living of memories of the years of imprisonment. This and the following scene carry out the function of exposition.
The extreme danger the prisoners faced is indicated by Bridie during this exposition: over-crowded ships sailing towards an enemy fleet, the unpreparedness of the British garrison in Singapore for the invasion, the fear of rape for the women. Misto thus sets up some of the issues to be confronted during the course of the play between the Australian Bridie and the former English schoolgirl Sheila. Sheila appears in SceneTwo, and the major conflict of the play begins to simmer.
Something To Remember You By
Sheila’s arrival at the motel from Perth introduces immediately one source of friction between the two: they clearly have not been in touch with one another for many decades. Each is just finding out such basic information as whether the other ever married or had children. The audience sees, too, that the warmth of Bridie’s greeting: “Gee it’s good to see you” is not reciprocated by Sheila. The audience wonders why not. The revelations by the end of Act One will finally show the reason. The body language described on page 26 indicates the deep underlying tension between the two--yet the scene ends with their lifting the suitcase as they used to lift the coffins of the dead: to the cries of Ichi, ni, san---Ya-ta! Their shared experiences are a strong bond.
Journey through memory
For the rest of Act One, the shared memories of Bridie and Sheila become those of the audience, through the dramatic techniques Misto uses.
In Scene Three, the audience is reminded of how young Sheila was when she was taken prisoner. The voice of a teenage girl sings part of ‘Jerusalem’, the stirring and visionary song with words by English poet William Blake, and the mature Sheila joins in. (Later Bridie and Sheila sing it together.)
Jerusalem
Bridie’s attitude from their first meeting as shipwreck survivors drifting in the sea is protective of Sheila. She sees her as “another stuck-up Pom”, and hits her with her Shoe-Horn to keep her awake. Sheila has been taught by her snobbish mother to look down on the Irish, the label she puts on the Sydney nurse from Chatswood because of her surname.
(World War 2 – Hospital Ship)
Further differences between the two surface in Scene Five, when the “officers’ club” set up by the Japanese is described. But by the end of this scene they are recalling the choir and “orchestra” of women’s voices set up by Miss Dryburgh. Scene Six opens with Bridie and Sheila in a conga line singing the parodies of well-known songs they’d used to taunt their captors and keep their spirits up.
(Conga Line)
Happy Times
Pain and tension
Soon they are arguing, focusing on their differing attitudes to the British women who in Bridie’s view were “selling themselves for food” to the Japanese. The tension rises as more and more is revealed about the deteriorating conditions for the prisoners and the relentless number of deaths, especially in the Belalau camp.
We’ll Meet Again
Australian Prime Minister – John Curtin
At the end of the Act, in a dramatic gesture, Sheila returns the Shoe-Horn.
She had claimed to sell it for quinine to save Bridie’s life--but in fact as she now reveals she had been forced to sleep with the enemy to buy the medicine.
She extorts from Bridie the implicit admission that she would not have made that sacrifice for her. Bridie says nothing, but cannot face Sheila. Sheila is shattered by the realisation:
“All these years I’ve told myself that you’d have done the same for me. [Calmly] I was wrong, though, wasn’t I?”
After the Ball Is Over
Act Two opens back in the studio, where Bridie and Sheila explain on the documentary the appalling conditions in the death camp of Belalau. Suspense is built by the revelation that orders had been given that no prisoners were to survive to the end of the war. The audience wants to know how there could have been survivors.
(Belalau Hut)
Epitaph to War
They also want to know how or if the tension in the relationship between the two women can be resolved. It becomes clear that the traumatised Sheila cannot in civilian life face any sexual relationship; nor has she felt able to return to Britain or to face remaining with her family in Singapore. She has led a quiet life as a librarian in Perth. Her nights are filled with nightmarish recollections about Lipstick Larry, and she drinks rather too much.
In contrast, Bridie had been happily married for years to the cheeky Australian soldier who had waved and winked at her at Christmas behind the wire. She is now widowed and childless.
Ambush and resolution
Misto is preparing an ambush for the audience. By Scene Twelve, Bridie’s “disgrace” is revealed. Spooked when she is surrounded by a group of chattering Japanese tourists in David Jones Food Hall, she runs away with a tin of shortbread and later pleads guilty in court to shoplifting. “I still lie awake cringing with shame” she tells Sheila. She could not explain the truth about her phobia to the court or to her family and friends.
The effect on Sheila is more than Bridie expected. She now decides that she can be at peace only if she faces the truth in public. She explains:
“There are probably thousands of survivors like us--still trapped in the war--too ashamed to tell anyone.”
You'll Never Know How Much I Love You
Bridie urges her not to.
But in Scene Thirteen after they have recounted how they were eventually discovered and rescued, days after the end of the war, it is in fact Bridie who reveals the truth of Sheila’s heroism and self-sacrifice. She then finds the courage to ask Sheila to explain about her shoplifting arrest The scene ends with the declaration Bridie has waited fifty years for: