Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 13
Production Team
Director: Lexi Sekuless
Sound Designer and Composer: Leisa Keen
Production Designer: Annette Sharpe
Lighting Designer: Jennifer Wright
Production Stage Manager: Katerina Smalley
Production Photography and Film: Daniel Abroguena
Interviewer voice: Timmy Sekuless
Set Construction: Simon Grist
Producer: Lexi Sekuless Productions
Publicity Photographer: Robert Coppa
Publicity Hair and Makeup: Vicky Hayes
Major partner: Elite Event Technology
Cast
Bridie: Andrea Close
Sheila: Zsuzsi Soboslay
Contingency: Tracy Noble
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| Bridie: Andrea Close, Sheila: Zsuzsi Soboslay in Shoe-Horn Sonata by John Misto Lexie Seculess Productions 2024 Photo supplied |
This is an unusual sonata, being a duet for trumpet and piano. It’s the story, based on true stories from nurses captured by the Japanese in World War II, of “Bridie” and “Sheila” who saved each other’s lives more than once during the period from 1942 to 1945, following the failure of the British administration and security to prevent Japan’s forces invading Singapore.
Nurses come in different shapes and sizes. Bridie is tall, a strongly built Australian, a get up and go, let’s do it now no matter what, type of nurse. She tells it as it is. We would say, No Bullshit.
Bridie trumpets at; while the English Sheila is softer and more tuneful, playing her scales for rather than at. Yet there is a time when her grand opera, a Tchaikovsky 1812, bursts out. And in the end her quiet secret, kept for 50 years, escapes, and brings Bridie to a new understanding about Sheila’s private strength; and a new self-awareness for herself.
The setting is a television interview with an invisible voice-over asking the questions, sometimes responding to the stories the women tell of what happened to them, as they were shipped out in crowded small boats from Singapore harbour; met each other nearly drowned when the Japanese Air Force fired on and sank their boats; and survived against soldiers and tropical sickness at a secret inland jungle camp with no known end to their incarceration. Japan’s intention was that all the women (and even their children from Singapore families) would die – but in secret, to avoid the Japanese being called to account for their war crimes.
In the foyer Lexie Seculess has displayed the real diary, kept by the real Betty Jeffrey, writing in pencil on exercise books stolen from the supervising soldiers, amazingly kept and kept secret until publication after the war as White Coolies. John Misto read this when young – and so began this play.
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| Betty Jeffrey's diary published as White Coolies |
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| Betty Jeffrey's pencil Photos: Frank McKone |
The fascinating, yet in a sense awful, aspect, while watching the performance (with occasional snippets on a 1960’s tv set of how they looked on screen), is how these traumatic experiences generate both often dreadful criticism of each other at the same time creating an unbreakable bond of mateship. It is the revelation of the secret Sheila kept for 50 years which seals the bond at last during the interview. What is revealed is as powerful in its effect on us, watching, as it is for Bridie.
The performances of both Andrea Close and Zsuzsi Soboslay are outstanding. The Mill Theatre is small and they are very much up close.
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| Bridie: Andrea Close and Sheila: Zsuzsi Soboslay in Shoe-Horn Sonata by John Misto Lexie Seculess Productions 2024 Photo supplied |
And we never miss even the smallest turn away or look towards, expression of concern or sudden anger between these two such different but bound together characters.
You should take the chance as I and others did to meet the actors and director in the foyer after the show. For me the essential value of our meeting was for the women to explain how the mateship bond in war is so different for women than for men. These women – those who survived, and those who did not – knew from when they were girls how they were always under threat from men. So for these women – these actresses – telling the stories of these wartime nurses, the sense of threat and the need to be so brave in the face of an army of men instructed to literally rape and kill, or just leave to die, provided the energy and determination which created their characters with such strength.
And so this play is not merely an historical documentary – which it might look like on an external screen – but becomes a plea for men – in or out of war – to treat women with the respect and honour with which they should treat their own mates.
And in a case of amazing serendipity I have also just reviewed RGB: Of Many, One with precisely the same demand, and warning if we men fail, from eminent human rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Don’t miss.
©Frank McKone, Canberra
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