It’s more than a quarter of a century since John Misto’s The Shoe Horn Sonata was staged at The Street Theatre in Canberra, but now it’s been revived by director Lexi Sekuless at Mill Theatre in Dairy Road during the lead up to Anzac Day.

In the play, meeting after many years for a TV documentary, Bridie (Andrea Close) and Sheila (Zsuzsi Soboslay) relive their past in Japanese POW camps of Sumatra.

And as anyone who’s seen Bruce Beresford’s movie, Paradise Road, the horrors of reality in the camps are somewhat alleviated when the women form a choir.

The characters in Misto’s play are fictional but the story is based entirely on reports of those who survived the camps, outlined in a 1954 memoir called White Coolies by survivor and Australian nurse Betty Jeffrey, as well as in other documents relating to massacres, camp life and the sinking of the steamship the Vyner Brook.

Misto wrote the play as part of the successful lobbying effort to get a memorial for Australian Nurses on Anzac Parade.

Sekuless told CityNews on Tuesday the preview season had gone well and that a big surprise to her and the cast was just how many laughs the show got. She admitted that, given the subject matter, some of that could have been nervous laughter, but says much of the humour is in the rich Aussie vein of The Castle.

Misto said recently: “I originally wrote this play in the ’90s to get the attention of an unfeeling Defence bureaucracy in Canberra, so it is very fitting to have this production revived in the ACT.”

The Shoe Horn Sonata, Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, April 10-27.

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