The Shoehorn Sonata Speech
- Submitted by: DakotaGrace
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- Category: English
- Date Submitted: 10/02/2011 09:29 PM
- Pages: 16
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Good morning, students and teachers of year 12 …… High School and Distance Education Centre. My name is ….. and I am glad to stand before you today with the privilege of imparting to you just some of the parts of the play The Shoe-horn Sonata that have made the greatest visual impression on me, and I’m strongly persuaded, upon audiences Australia wide of not only the longsuffering resilience, horror, sense of humour, able forgiveness, and compassion for one another of those imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, but also their faith and dependence upon He who is truly able.
We shall never know nor shall we ever be able to comprehend the measure of suffering endured by the hundreds of thousands of women imprisoned by the Japanese in South East Asia during period of the Second World War, the largest and most violent armed conflict in our world’s history. The Shoe-horn Sonata is an Australian drama composed by the established playwright John Misto, which attempts to explore this particular element of the war; that is, the plight of those women and often children captured by the Japanese. The Shoe-horn Sonata is essentially the ‘untold story of hundreds, of thousands of women imprisoned by the Japanese’. Misto describes his purpose for writing the play as 'I do not have the power to build a memorial so I wrote a play instead.' It is his desire that the memory these women should be uplifted and commemorated with utmost credibility, a desire which is made manifest in his rich use of dramatic techniques. Highly evocative music, projected historically significant photographs, calm beckoning voice-over, intense sound effects, rich symbolism and the employment of raw Irish-Australian almost larrikin-like humour are intrinsic to the credibility of the script, making each scene both compelling and memorable. The drama is centred around two characters- Australian nurse Bridie and the Sheila, a British school girl of fifteen years who met after their ships...
We shall never know nor shall we ever be able to comprehend the measure of suffering endured by the hundreds of thousands of women imprisoned by the Japanese in South East Asia during period of the Second World War, the largest and most violent armed conflict in our world’s history. The Shoe-horn Sonata is an Australian drama composed by the established playwright John Misto, which attempts to explore this particular element of the war; that is, the plight of those women and often children captured by the Japanese. The Shoe-horn Sonata is essentially the ‘untold story of hundreds, of thousands of women imprisoned by the Japanese’. Misto describes his purpose for writing the play as 'I do not have the power to build a memorial so I wrote a play instead.' It is his desire that the memory these women should be uplifted and commemorated with utmost credibility, a desire which is made manifest in his rich use of dramatic techniques. Highly evocative music, projected historically significant photographs, calm beckoning voice-over, intense sound effects, rich symbolism and the employment of raw Irish-Australian almost larrikin-like humour are intrinsic to the credibility of the script, making each scene both compelling and memorable. The drama is centred around two characters- Australian nurse Bridie and the Sheila, a British school girl of fifteen years who met after their ships...