The Shoe-Horn Sonata: Act One, Scene Six Summary & Analysis

Back in Sheila’s hotel room, the two friends form a “two-person conga line” and sing an old song from the prison camps, practicing it so they can perform it on television with the rest of the women. However, Sheila expresses her uneasiness with the idea of doing something for “a few cheap laughs on Rick’s show.” In fact, she says, she doesn’t even like Rick, who she thinks is trying too hard to pry into their pasts with indecent questions. Bridie, for her part, says Sheila doesn’t have to answer his questions, adding that she didn’t appreciate her “little dig” about the Australian man who “offered” the women to the Japanese guards. “It’s not patriotic to attack our men,” she adds, but Sheila only voices a similar complaint, lamenting the fact that Bridie talked about “the British women selling themselves for food.”

Bridie stands by her belief that it was “crass” and unforgiveable of the British women in the camps to “offer” themselves to the guards. She believes this because she thinks that “every woman who gave in made it harder for the rest” to say no to the enemy. When Sheila reminds her that these women were only trying to protect their children, Bridie says, “Sleeping with a Jap? I’d never have done that—not for anyone. How could you go on living with yourself—or look your family in the eye?”

After ranting about how much she abhors the idea of sleeping with a guard, Bridie sees a photograph of Sheila as a young woman, and Sheila tells her that Rick asked for pictures of her life before the war. Bridie then asks if she can have a copy, and when Sheila asks why, she says that she simply likes to have pictures of her friends. “People always get on when they’re tossed in together. I’d hardly call that a friendship,” Sheila says, but Bridie ignores this statement by handing her a “small tobacco tin.” Apparently, Sheila filled this tin with her own dinner one night in the prison camps, giving it to Bridie when Bridie was sick with dengue fever. Bridie was immensely thankful for this, but Sheila downplays the significance of this gesture, saying, “A few spoons of rice. I didn’t even miss them.”

Seeing how determined Sheila is to act like she doesn’t care about their friendship, Bridie says she misses the old Sheila. Having said this, she goes to dinner, leaving Sheila alone in the room. Moving to the dresser, Sheila opens a drawer and takes out a shoe-horn, staring at it as a voice-over plays. As she stands there looking at the shoe-horn, the audience hears her voice as a young woman—she is pleading with a group of Japanese guards, who tell her to sing for them. At first, the guards laugh and applaud as she sings, but soon they become silent, touched by the beauty of her song. As the melody draws to a close, Sheila continues to gaze at the shoe-horn, and the screen behind her shows a picture of two female prisoners looking at the camera in utter destitution.