The Shoe Horn Sonata is a play by Australian playwright John Misto, one of Australia's most eminent playwrights who has also worked as a script writer for Australian television, creating and writing the hit television series The Damnation of Harvey McHugh.
The Shoe Horn Sonata is set in 1995, fifty years after protagonists Sheila and Birdie were released from a Japanese prison camp where they were held during World War II. This is the first time that they have been together since their liberation and their reason for reuniting is to appear on a television documentary about their wartime experiences. Both women had been captured when the ships they were traveling on were torpedoed by Japanese submarines, and sunk, leaving the ships' passengers to be picked up by the invading Japanese Navy. Although they used to be friends, the two women harbor a lot of resentment for each other, and Sheila, a British woman, puts fuel to the fire by disparaging Australians and blaming them for what happened to the women in the prisoner of war camp. At the end of the play we learn that both women have been holding on to terrible secrets for fifty years, and that it is only when they reveal these secrets to the documentary maker and their interviewer that they truly feel liberated from their experiences.
The Shoe Horn Sonata is Misto's best known play, and also his most prolifically awarded; the play won the Australia Remembers Play Competition and the New South Wales Permier's Literary Award for Best Play. Misto has written nine other plays, but this remains both his most widely performed and his most memorable.
