Prisoner star Maggie Kirkpatrick stars in another prison drama - this time of female POWs during World War II.

THE SHOE-HORN SONATA
Where: Q Theatre, corner Railway and Belmore streets, Penrith
When: Until March 13
How much: $35/$25
Bookings: 4721 8832

In 1967, when playwright John Misto was a schoolboy, he was caught reading a risque novel, the banned Peyton Place, during religion class.

Yet instead of giving him the strap, Misto's teacher gave him another, worthier book to read and write a report on: White Coolies by Betty Jeffrey, an Australian nurse who served in Malaya and Singapore during World War II.

The young Misto was fascinated by Jeffrey's account of her capture and imprisonment by the Japanese during the war. For the next 30 years, he sought a way to tell the story of the hundreds of female civilians and military nurses who had endured the same fate.

The result was The Shoe-Horn Sonata, first produced by the Ensemble Theatre in 1995. The play went on to win several prizes, including a NSW Premier's Literary Award. (Misto donated the entire $20,000 of one of these prizes to the Royal College of Nursing.) 

"The play is about the stories we don't tell about war," says Misto. "The people who usually bear the brunt of war are the civilians, and the people who are non-combatants, who find themselves caught up in war."

The piece is an account of the friendship between two women imprisoned for almost four years in Belalau camp, in what is now Indonesia: Bridie, an Australian nurse (Maggie Kirkpatrick), and Sheila, an English schoolgirl (Belinda Giblin). They meet at a reunion for survivors 50 years later, where a documentary is being filmed about their experiences.

Misto was also motivated by a sense of justice to write the play, because he felt these women had been largely forgotten by history.

"We always tell our war stories in terms of battle, not in terms of the people who were caught up in it," says Misto. "These women were the princesses of an empire which crashed around them. Some of them couldn't make a bed, and they [were] thrown overnight up against a ruthless invader."

The script is based on the testimony of about a dozen women around Australia. Through his characters, Misto details the starvation, beatings, disease and ritual humiliation the women suffered at the hands of the Japanese.

Despite the distressing detail, Misto never intended his play to be anti-Japanese. He says that for every story of Japanese cruelty, he included an example of the Allies' cruelty, such as the projection of photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima onto the set of the play.

The focus, like all the best war stories, is on survival, the strength of the human spirit and the courage of everyday people: people who came out alive, but damaged, and struggled to carry on life once released.

"You wouldn't expect women in genteel homes to have seen the horrors of life that they saw," says Misto. "I thought I'd try and tell, in a coherent way, all the little stories - Bridie and Sheila sharing a caramel, chewing the bone to forget their hunger, pressing a pillow to their stomach ... the heart-breaking things that we don't think about with war."

Despite the women's suffering, Misto says, "They're not bitter against the Japanese, but they're bitter about being locked out of history".

Misto illustrates this point by recounting the story of a year 12 English teacher who taught his play, which has been on the HSC syllabus for six years.

"[She] said to her class: 'Find everything you can about prisoners of the Japanese.' The kids came in with mountains of material and she said, 'Now what have you got on the women and children?' and they said, 'Oh no, there weren't any.' She said, 'Now we're ready to start the play.'"

Misto says both male and female POWs were encouraged to keep quiet about their experiences once home. Military POWs have since been formally honoured by the Australian government, but the female civilians were largely forgotten.

The government negotiated with the Japanese after the war for compensation payments for the prisoners. According to Misto, the figure they arrived at worked out to be about sixpence for every day spent in captivity. For women whose health had been largely ruined by imprisonment, it was hardly enough.

Misto makes no apologies for the dark nature of his material.

"In theatre, I think we should be talking about everything," he says. "Once upon a time, theatre was the venue where you dealt with difficult stuff." 

By Jacqueline Maley
March 5, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
Source: www.smh.com.au