Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategems for Survival on the Thai-Burma Railway 1942–1945 by Sears A. Eldredge (review)

Sears Eldredge’s detailed investigation of the theatrical and musical performances in Japanese POW camps in Southeast Asia during World War II argues that performance played a critical role in mental health and survival of Allied prisoners. This is a nuanced account of activities in different camps from the fall of Singapore (15 February 1942), with incarceration of English and Australians at Changi, to the addition of the Dutch/Eurasians from Indonesia, to activities at various camps in Thailand and Burma during the building of the railroad, to the closing of the facilities after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Eldredge carefully documents how the arts helped the sixty-one thousand POWs in dehumanizing conditions renew their will to live. Interviews, diaries, archives, playbills, and artifacts—from glamorous female impersonators’ gowns crafted from mosquito netting to small pieces of woven bamboo-work that formed a proscenium arch—are examined as the author reconstructs production by production. This review will briefly chart the contents, giving perhaps more emphasis to connections with Asian genres than the book itself. Performances largely tried to replicate the European and Southeast Asian colonial elite’s popular entertainments of the period. Eldredge incorporates a wealth of illustrations (programs, costume design plots, photos, and sketches) documenting the activities and embeds audio clips of interviews with former POWs and musical samples. At the end of the book he provides lyrics to songs from the Far Eastern Prisoner of War (FEPOW) Songbook.

The creativity and commitment in building stages, finding orchestras, training performers, pilfering materials from captors, and rehearsing casts or music groups that were constantly losing personnel to work drafts, illness, and death shows a will to entertain against enormous odds. There are accounts of comedians who provoked immediate beatings by their onstage satire of the Japanese, but also interesting reports of a Japanese commander who did a samurai-style sword dance to entertain the POWs (p. 117) and music-loving Japanese camp commanders who purchased from Bangkok scores for a POW orchestra. Japanese officers who felt entertainment helped morale and made the men better workers helped the shows to go on and in some camps released some of the artists from other work to create performances. These leaders are contrasted with others of anti-theatrical prejudice or who punished artists who got out of line or violated censorship by sending them to harsher camps. Eldredge found that POW performances was valued by Japanese captors and Korean guards, who themselves lacked entertainment. Some guards (like most of the audience) were entranced by the dancing and singing of talented female impersonators, who Eldredge reveals as true stars, creating not a parody of the feminine but artistic representation of the female.

A former POW actor/designer Jack Chalker comments that the programs

gave hope to thousands—to see a “show” in the midst of appalling illness, and to be involved as so many were from all walks of life and experience in contributing to it, whether making up a small prop on their bed-space, helping to repair the stage, or stealing paper from the Jap compound for us to write out our scripts—or perform our scripts—or perform, make music. … It was a great business and embraced all POW’s of whatever nation, either in separate or combined performances.

(p. 560)

Eldredge, despite his greater attention to the English-language productions, tries to fill in the history of the Dutch/Eurasian prisoners brought from the Dutch East Indies. He notes their contributions, which ranged from cabaret to Javanese court dance to Portuguese-influenced kroncong music (pp. 242–243). He cites the ethnocentrism of the English speakers who initially attempted to bar the Dutch prisoners, led by Wim Kan of the professional Dutch group ABC Cabaret, from sharing the stage. Dutch and Indo prisoners had to...