Bridie
Bridie is one of the protagonists of the play. She is a proud Australian woman who became involved in World War II on purpose, wanting to contribute to the war effort, serve her country and support the brave men who had been called up to go to war. She becomes a nurse and is sent to a field hospital in Singapore where she tends to wounded Australian soldiers. She is fiercely patriotic and still harbors resentment against the British soldiers whom she feels did not help the Australians quickly enough in their fight against the Japanese. Bridie is taken prisoner by Japanese soldiers when the ship she is being evacuated on is torpedoed and she is picked up whilst clinging to a wooden beam from the ship floating in the ocean.
There are no gray areas for Bridie. She is a woman of fixed ideas about what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do, and she would rather die because she did the right thing than survive by doing the wrong thing. There are no blurred lines at all for her.She is certain to the core of her being that having sex with a Japanese soldier is wrong and there is no circumstance under which she would willingly do so. She looks down on the prisoners who exchanged sex for privileges and sees them as a despicable combination of traitors and whores. Bridie would not have offered sexual favors to save her own life and she would not have offered sex to save Sheiila's life either. Sheila knows this and the fact becomes an elephant in the room for the two women.
Sheila never came to visit Bridie after the war and Bridie is still very angry about this. She is also hurt and feels rejected. She cannot understand Sheila's reasoning because Bridie feels that after surviving an experience like the prison together they are bonded forever in a way that nobody else could understand.
Bridie is deeply ashamed of her post traumatic stress disorder. She sees is as a weakness in herself. She would rather be thought a shoplifter than admit publicly to having PTSD, and to still be so afraid of Japanese people that she has to run from them when she hears their voices. When Sheila tells the world that Bridie was arrested for shoplifting and the circumstances leading up to this, Bridie feels as though there is a weight lifted from her shoulders.
Sheila
A very British woman, Sheila has lived the last five decades of her life in Australia, but still has a characteristic British air of colonial snobbery about her. She grew up in Singapore with parents who refused to evacuate because they saw it as a form of giving in to the invading Japanese, but when it became clear that they were in danger she was sent to Australia by ship. Her ship was torpedoed, just like Bridie's, and she was picked up clinging to the other side of Bridie's piece of wood.
As a prisoner, Sheila shared Bridie's views about collaboration with the Japanese for the most part; she saw that there was no reason to brighten their days with flirting or the offer of sex, but when Bridie becomes ill she offers sexual favors to a particularly overbearing guard in exchange for anti-malarial medication. She lets Bridie believe that she has traded in her shoe horn for the medicine because she knows exactly what her friend will think of her and also worries that Bridie will refuse the medication all together if she knows how it was provided.
Sheila never told Bridie that she was raped; in fact, she never told anyone. To Sheila, the women's friendship was over the moment they were liberated from the prison. Bridie was a reminder of everything that she had endured since they had not been friends before they were imprisoned and would probably never have been friends because of their many differences.She associates Bridie with the prison and for that reason does not want to maintain their friendship. Like Bridie, once Sheila's rape is made public, she feels free for the first time in fifty years.
Rick
Rick is not so much a character in the play as a theatrical device, in that he is not developed as a character in of himself; rather, he is the catalyst for the presentation of the memories and reminiscences of the women, as the television interviewer who is talking to them and bringing their memories our of them. His is a pivotal role, because it is only through him that we learn what the women went through in the prison. As a character, though, he is one-dimensional and no better known to us at the end of the play than he was at the beginning.
