At the core of the family, indeed, the play, are three sisters (a three-pronged relationship many a famous playwright has chosen to explore). Hilary, the eldest, is a single mother who has never left Sorrento; tending to their ageing father while raising her son alone after the death of her husband. Meg, the middle sister, has dusted the 'dirt' of Australia from her soul and relocated to England, where she lives with her British husband Edwin and has since penned a critically praised novel called Melancholy. Pippa is the youngest; a vibrant neophyte New Yorker who has returned to her homeland with the assignment of peddling American margarine on our shores.

Although the three are outwardly civil, it is clear from the onset of the action that some

Director Tony Bird has done a fine job here. He maintains all the richness of Hannie Rayson's socio-political and cultural meditations without sacrificing the purely romantic or raw emotional aspects of the script. Likewise, it was well evident that the residents of this Hotel understood those people they were inhabiting, and that under the guidance of Tony, they were confident to plunge into an exigent realm.

Thrown into the mix are Marge Morrissey and Dick Bennett, two long-time friends who delight in intellectual sparring while on regular visits to Marge's holiday home at Sorrento. These seemingly peripheral characters are quite pivotal, serving as both philosophical and emotional counterpoint to the Moynihan women. Marge's affection for Meg's novel, which leads quickly to a protracted interest in the family, is a doubly effective dramatic device; her character, like a Greek chorus, gives the audience a window into the sisters' stories and also offers a detached narrator like commentary on them. Similarly Dick, a left-wing essayist who lives to debunk populist myths about Australia, offers heightened insight into the Moynihan family bunker as he lays siege to Meg's ex-pat opinions about Australia and acts as unwitting catalyst for the explosion of rising tensions.

thing is amiss. Is it that Meg's Melancholy is a thinly disguised account of their lives together? Or is it something buried deeper, simply arrested from its dormancy by Meg's 'fiction'? The gradual unveiling of closeted skeletons, along with an unexpected family tragedy, propels the disparate sis

Some common words found in the essay are:
HOTEL SORRENTO, Rob McPherson, Dick Bennett, Ken Bird, Hannie Rayson's, Meg's Melancholy, Similarly Dick, Fab Nob's, Melancholy Pippa, Australian Outback, hannie rayson's, tony bird, moynihan family, australian artists, hotel sorrento,
Approximate Word count = 1061
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)