Sometimes, triumphantly, the simple truth of a story takes us over in the theatre. Next Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the Japanese surrender and the end of the war in the pacific. John Misto's The Shoe-Horn Sonata is about the experience of the women who were imprisoned in concentration camps all over South-East Asia after the fall of Singapore, then neglected by successive governments ever since. 

The women represented in this play, in a camp deep in the jungle of Sumatra where they were sent to die, did not hear of the surrender until three days later and were not liberated for a week. Emaciated and desperate after the surrender, they were marched or forced to crawl to the top of a hill, expecting to be shot, and were then entertained for two hours by a Japanese military band in crisp white uniforms playing The Blue Danube. “The Geneva Convention says that prisoners-of-war must have culture,” announces the camp commander who has been torturing them. “Here is your culture.” “Something tells me the Japanese are losing the war,” whispers Bridie to Sheila, with the wry humour that is the hallmark of this show. By then the Japanese had already lost it. Fifty years later - in other words, right now in both real and artistic terms - these wonderfully resilient survivors,  Bridie and Sheila, have been brought together to speak on television for the anniversary.

The play is a dramatisation of their war experience but also of the commemorations we are now having. After a documentary opening of personal reminiscence, the relationship between these old women, close friends but then estranged for the 50 years since, begins to take over the play. The horrors of life in the camps become a backdrop, represented by projected slides and the relentless narration of what happened to them, in front of which their newly revived personal drama unfolds. The two women, a battling, working-class, Irish-Australian, Catholic nurse and a genteel English librarian, explore the roots of an unlikely intimacy borne out of a terrible shared experience. They speak publicly in the television studio of their lives in the camps while exploring darker, more deeply surpressed experiences and emotions in their hotel room’s after each day’s shooting. The contrasts in the script - between the two women’s personalities, between the luxury of their hotel surroundings and the appalling deprivation of what they are being asked to dredge up from their past - are dramatic and involving.

The play is sentimental in the way that any deeply felt emotion, expressed with straight forward honesty, is sentimental. It is comically underscored by a dry, very Australian, debunking sense of humour. But what really makes this production special is the marvellous presence together in these roles of two of Australia’s best mature actors - Maggie Kirkpatrick and Melissa Jaffer. Kirkpatrick, as the rough diamond battleaxe with a fiercely loyal and devoted heart but a wicked tongue, is wonderfully funny and very moving. Jaffer, all refined fragility and steely self-control, harbours her big secret with marvellously understated reserve.  Between the two they take us on the play’s journey with great skill.   Their relationship - carer to cared-for,  Aussie to Pom,  friend to friend - is developed with beautiful warmth and humour.  Misto’s script is simple,  direct and almost naively reverential about it’s subject.   It could easily come across as formulaic and softly sentimental - especially in a few of the more obvious curtain lines and revelations - but Kirkpatrick and Jaffer transform it here into a very powerful experience.

Reviewed by John McCallum in “The Australian”
August 1995