The award winning play Hotel Sorrento by Australian Playwright Hannie Rayson, which inspired the film of the same name, tells the story of three sisters who grew up together in the seaside town Sorrento.

Hilary lives in the family home in Sorrento with her father and 16 year-old son. Pippa, a business woman, is visiting from New York and Meg, a successful writer, returns from England. When the three sisters are reunited after 10 years apart they again feel the constraints of family life. A semi autobiographical book written by middle sister and expat Meg triggers the familial tensions and dramas that eventuate. The play is about family in a literal and metaphorical sense and the importance of blood ties and collective memory, true or false.

Hotel Sorrento was first performed in 1990 by the Playbox Theatre Company and won an AWGIE, NSW Premier’s Literary Award and a Green Room Award. Since then the play has had over 50 productions throughout Australia and overseas (winning critical acclaim on its London debut), and has been translated into French, Japanese and Swedish.

This will represent the 20th anniversary of HIT’s first production of the play. HIT has a great deal of affection for Hotel Sorrento being that it was a production of this play in 1998, directed by David Latham, that launched HIT’s touring arm in 1999.

“Holding a mirror up to the society in which it was written, it has universal themes and feels even more relevant (than when it premiered in 1990) to a world living in fear, keenly aware of difference and to a nation constantly questioning the nature of being Australian and interrogating our ties to the Mother Country and our alliance with the US. Hannie Rayson perceptively examines these issues through the three sisters (as in Chekhov) who represent distinctly different facets of ‘The Australian’, especially ‘The Australian Woman’. This is a moving, insightful and often very funny piece of entertaining first-rate theatre.”
Denny Lawrence, Director

Show run time – approximately two (2) hours including a 20-minute interval.