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Home > English > Standard > Module A: Experience Through Language > Elective 2: Distinctively Visual > The Shoe Horn Sonata

Making drama out of reality

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. Like Bruce Beresford when he researched and wrote the screenplay for Paradise Road, 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. Further discussion of the ways he does this is in the Characterisation file.

Solving the problems 1: Resources

Misto has written this play for the requirements of contemporary theatrical productions. A filmmaker may have literally hundreds of extras (as Bruce Beresford did in Paradise Road). A school major production can often use fairly large numbers of actors, depending on the size of the stage and the rehearsal time available. But modern commercial theatres have to pay their way and they work on tight budgets. Some of the plays they decide to present during a year will have perhaps six or eight actors, but others will have only one or two, to help balance the theatre’s budget.

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. Minimal props are needed, including a suitcase, the Shoe-Horn, some photographs and embroidery.

The first problem: keeping the play affordable for theatre, Misto solves by casting only two actors, and using a simple set.

Solving the problems 2: Keeping the audience interested

His second problem is how to keep an audience entertained and interested if for the whole performance 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 photographic images 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.

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.

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. 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, 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]

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.

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 Blue Danube 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.

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.

Solving the problems 3: Making it bearable

A third problem, maybe the major one 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. The approach Misto took is similar in some ways to those taken by Roberto Benigni in his movie Life is Beautiful and by Stephen Spielberg in the movie Schindler’s List, based on the Thomas Kenneally book, Schindler’s Ark.

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.

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-Horn Sonata uses words, reinforced with pictures and music, to establish these horrors in the imaginations of the audience.

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