Shoe Horn Sonata DRMATIC TECHNIQUES

He uses a wide variety of dramatic techniques to support the actors dialogue, these include,
photographic images, voice-overs and song and instrumental music.
Music is a strong presence in the play adding variety and emotional subtext to many of the plays
scenes. It also places them in their historical contexts and on some occasions suggests the irony of
the situations the two women faced.

NO photographs exist of the women in the prison camps but a wide variety of other images appear
on screen as a background to the dialogue. These include:
- Photographs taken of male P.O.Ws when they were liberated
- Photographs of nurses arriving in Singapore from Belalau
- Contrasting images of Singapore: the confident, imperial city before its fall, and the bombed and
burning city afterwards.

These images add credibility to the script as the central situation Misto sets up is the making of a
television documentary.
Voice-over is used for the only other speaking role in the play, Rick, the interviewer and his voice
adds variety to the sound and texture of the play.

The problem of how to make a play about suffering, cruelty, deprivation and death bearable for a
modern audience is dealt with by using:
- Humor to lighten some scenes. We see this when the Prime Ministers message finally reaches the
Australian nurses in Scene , Keep smiling!, to which they break into helpless laughter at the irony of
the message to their situation. Also the contrast between the main characters, the prim British
schoolgirl Sheila, and the more practical Sydney nurse Bridie provides another source of humor
- Another 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 survived the
camps and lived through the subsequent years and have in some ways dealt with the trauma. Now as
survivors they can look back.
- Misto also makes no attempt to reproduce on stage the appalling brutalities carried out in the
camps. Instead he allows his dramatic techniques of photographs, voice-overs and music to establish
these horrors in the imaginations of the audience.