By Sears Eldredge
Arms and the Man
On May 28, a new entertainment group, “The Temple Players,” appeared in the Command Area to give their first performance in the 11th H.Q. Division at Temple Hill. The Players, composed entirely of officers, chose George Bernard Shaw’s full-length play, Arms and the Man, for their debut. This would be the first time a straight play had been attempted in Changi. It had quirky characters, an absurd plot, and scintillating dialogue barbed with typical Shavian wit. But, given the circumstances, it was also a provocative choice. In the words of one critic, Shaw’s play was a “comedy that mocked war, propaganda, lies, and false heroism.”[i] Arms and the Man would engage audiences in a way that the Variety Shows and Revues did not, and it proved to be hugely popular with the POWs.
Courtesy of the Bettany Family.
Unfortunately, the opening night’s performance in their open-air theatre was rained out, and had to be postponed until the following day. And the performance that Australian S.M.O.[1] Albert Coates saw on the 31st also got rained out in a fierce storm: “Near the end rain stopped the play and we made for camp. We were soaked in a minute, blue with cold, wind blowing branches off trees off right and left, nearest approach to hurricane I’ve seen.”[ii] With the coming rainy season, foreshadowed by drenching tropical squalls (deemed “Sumatras”), there was now a determined effort by the Divisional Concert Parties to acquire indoor performance spaces. Indoor theatres would allow them to do more than keep the rain off themselves and their audiences; they would increase the performers’ abilities to project their voices so they could be heard more easily. And, as electricity was slowly being restored to the different Areas of Changi, lighting effects, combined with scenery, would greatly enhance a show’s effectiveness. Most of all it would give the theatrical producers an opportunity to create the atmosphere of attending a real theatre back home. Unfortunately, these indoor spaces would also limit the size of audiences.
[1] Senior Medical Officer.
[i] Weintraub, “Introduction,” xix.
[ii] Coates, 7.
Note that all the documents in this series of blogs reside in Sears A. Eldredge Archive in the De Witt Wallace Library at Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55105
Sear’s book, Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand-Burma Railway 1942-1945, was published by Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2014, as an open-access e-book and is available here: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/22
RFHG 