The Unseen Rick
One of the most powerful uses of imagery in the play is directed specifically toward what is not visually represented. When we hear the word imagery it is natural to immediately think of visual images which in turns leads to seeking out visuals which can be clearly seen with the eye. Rick is an unseen presence who exists only as a disconnected voice asking the women questions ostensibly as part of a documentary interview. The imagery, however, lends him a much greater significance. If one considers that a documentarian is the storyteller of what actually happened to people under horrific conditions, then Rick becomes yet another unseen male who is controlling the lives and destiny of these women.
The Caramel
The piece of caramel that Bridie and Sheila share is another very effective use of imagery but for the exact opposite reason. The audience doesn’t need to see the act of the two women making that sweet piece of candy last for an almost absurd amount of time, but it is not the absence of those scenes of shared blissed which lends the caramel its power. It is the familiarity of the object and the disconnect between that familiarity and what the two women are describing. Readers or audience members think of caramel candy as a cheap and disposable treat, not a luxury that is almost sanctified. It is that distance between what we experience and what those who lived through terrible times experienced that makes this imagery viscerally powerful.
Visual Effects
Rick notwithstanding, the play is much more highly dependent upon those expectations of visual imagery which can be seen. An unusual feature of the production of this drama that is not a typical one for theatergoers is the use of still photographs projected as slides which bring to vivid life the foundation of reality behind the fiction of the narrative. In addition to such expected traditional images of wartime like prisoners of war and the machinery of battle are those less conventional images that really pack a punch of just how upside-down and topsy-turvy the world had become during those desperate years. For instance, in Act Two, Scene Nine a single image dominates literally by virtue of its size and symbolically by virtue of its meaning: white Anglo women standing but bent over in a traditional Japanese bowing of respect.
Songs
Songs are used as imagery to create irony throughout the play. Traditional Christmas carols sung in prison camps were an authentic way for inmates to try to create an illusion of normality under horrific conditions, but ultimately the sincerity cannot but give way to the irony expressed in a title like “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Likewise, the insanely jingoistic attachment to the patriotic anthem “Rule Britannia” with its opening lyrics asserting that Britons “never shall be slaves” carries this ironic use of imagery to the ultimate extreme.
