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

Themes and concerns

The healing power of truth

Every drama takes its audience on a journey. The ending of the play’s action not only gives a sense of closure and completion, but also usually indicates what for the playwright is of major importance.

Throughout The Shoe-Horn Sonata Bridie and Sheila have uncovered events and emotions they have kept hidden for half a century: Sheila’s desperate gesture of swapping herself for the medicine to save Bridie’s life. Bridie’s constant but hidden terror of the guards, which is shown when she runs from the shop when she is surrounded by the harmless Japanese-speaking tourists.

Up to the time of the play’s action, neither has been able to reveal what has shamed her so deeply. Meeting again eventually allows them to reveal and face the nightmares that have traumatised them since their captivity. They also have to alter some of the attitudes they held when young.

They tell one another the truths they have been suppressing, and then give each other the courage to reveal them to Rick and the world through the television documentary.

The ending is therefore not a ‘false’ upbeat and cheerful scene to leave the audience forgetting the horrors they have learnt about. A ‘sonata’ is a musical piece for two instruments, and during their captivity Bridie and Sheila literally and metaphorically made a musical duo. Now their declarations of friendship and their dancing as the stage darkens shows the audience that they have finally faced, together, the horrors that have given them nightmares. We realise that facing these realities has made them free to live their remaining lives at peace with one another and with themselves.

Mateship and resourcefulness

Anecdotal evidence from the memoirs of Australian prisoners-of-war suggests that they had a higher rate of survival than other nationalities taken by the Japanese. [This is to be a theme of the new Australian television drama, Changi, being produced in 2001 discussed in The Sydney Morning Herald, the guide, Feb.5 to11, 2001] Their strong sense of mateship, which involved constantly looking out for one another, is claimed to be one reason for this.

Another reason given is their ‘can-do’ approach, and their resourcefulness in making the most of whatever they had at hand. They were considered to be more independent and practical than soldiers of other countries, not likely to wait for orders-in fact more likely to challenge authority.

The Shoe-Horn Sonata shows that the Australian nurses and others in camp with them (but not all) also shared these qualities. The play shows that in camp Sheila and Bridie worked together as best mates, and their support for one another was a major reason they survived in circumstances where many didn’t. This involved enormous self-sacrifice on Sheila’s part. Their knowledge of health and best practices to maintain it without any of the resources they were used to also helped them survive.

The power of art

The power of music to lift the prisoners’ spirits is made clear from the title of the play. The women’s amazing resourcefulness in creating an ‘orchestra’ consisting entirely of human voices-and one Shoe-Horn-has become one of the great legends of captivity. Bridie and Sheila create their own sonata, a medley of familiar music, when the choir has been disbanded because of deaths and weakness.

They recall the surprise and delight one Christmas when the Australian men visited and from the outside of the barbed wire fence sang “O, Come All Ye Faithful”, and the women’s choir sang a carol in return.

The power of words is also made clear in the play. The women sing The Captives’ Hymn at the opening of Act Two, but as they tell of their last dreadful months of captivity, they recall the parodies of popular songs they sang in defiance of their captors:

“One day I killed a Jap/Killed a Jap/I hit him on the head/ With a bloody lump of lead...”

Revealing injustice

Misto has said that one purpose of his play is to show the injustices he believes have been done to the memory of the nurses, and of the thousands of other women and children who suffered with them. His Author’s Note (p 16) makes this clear. Their compensation afterwards was inadequate, and for fifty years no memorial was organised for them. The bombing of ships full of women and children and the shooting of nurses and Australian soldiers, breaking the international rules of war, was in fact what is now called a ‘war crime’.

In particular the evidence given that medicines provided by the International Red Cross lay unused outside the camp boundaries when children as well as women like Sheila were dying inside is a chilling reminder of the inhumanity of war.

Student activities

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