Shoehorn 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
ofsuspense, 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 victimslater lives. To hold an audience. however, he needed to
haveelements 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 theatres 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 photographicimages and voice-over to support the actorsdialogue. He also uses
the power of music to support his script. The images and music provide constantly changing
focuses for the audiences 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
thelife support system in the camps. It also adds variety and emotional sub-text to many of
the plays 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
womens spoken memories, Misto uses excerpts from more than a dozen songs from the
period, and such orchestral items as The Blue Danube Waltz andDanny Boy. Particularly
moving for the two characters and for the audience is the recreation of the CaptivesHymn,
written in the camp by Margaret Dryburgh and sung every Sunday by the women, and the
playing of RavelsBolero, 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 movieSchindlers List,
based on the Thomas Kenneally book, Schindlers 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 Ministers 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: asobscene --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.