Three sisters, Hilary, Meg and Pippa, are to be united for the first time in ten years in Sorrento, the quiet town where they grew up. The eldest, Hilary, has never left home – she still lives with her father, Wal, and sixteen year old son Troy, and to all intents and purposes has taken the place of her mother. The youngest, Pippa, is outwardly a successful New York based advertising executive, but back home she is still the eternal adolescent. It is Meg, the middle sister who is perhaps the most complex – a writer whose latest work, which has just been nominated for the booker prize, is too autobiographical for comfort and hides the clue to a dark tragedy and the deepest issues of sacrifice and responsibility. 

An interesting venue for this play is the Cock Tavern theatre, a space intimate enough to absorb the levels of intensity and occasional humour, both delivered by a strong, excellent cast. Maggie Daniels, Shelley Lang and Alix Longman bring to life the contradictory personalities and tensions between the three sisters, while Alex Farrow marvelously captures the emotional offload that Megan’s young son, Troy, has inherited. There is a strong performance, also, from Edmund Dehn, who as Dick, an Australian political writer catapulted into the centre of the family dynamic, provides a strong, often-strident voice for Australian national identity and opposes Meg’s angst-ridden expatriatism. Note must also be given to Martin Blendel, flawless as Wal, the loveable but flawed father of the family, and Ania Marsen, who as Dick’s friend and Meg’s literary admirer, Marge, is the very English embodiment of a fragile but tenacious feminism.

The set is simple and unchanging – a couch, an ironing board and a small raised platform that often stands for another stage, an alternative space where the silent drama of absent characters is still being played out. Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher has created an admirably choreographed production - Often the entire cast is all on stage at once, with a switching between absent and present which becomes more and more frequent until all merge together at the climax. Nothing is held back – here in this medium box of a theatre there is a true assault on our senses, as the smell of real cigarettes and fried onions waft towards us. Music, the sound of the sea – sense of place is created expertly and emotively, and merges so well with the drama that at a certain point I have to confess I had tears in my eyes.

The script is both loud and subtle, with a real strain of apprehension. Who, really, was Gary, Hilary’s husband, now dead by ten years, and what is the secret that surrounds him? Like Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he is the strain of guilt and tension running all the way through the play. How this gradually emerges, like flotsam that cannot quite rise to the surface, is a testimony to Hannie Rayson’s expertise as a writer.

Should this play be seen? The answer is a resounding yes. It is not perfect – it lacks sparseness and the crowded stage can overpower sometimes. Although the Cock Tavern is one of my favourite theatres, it would be interesting to see how this production would work in a slightly larger space. On a wider note, it would be good to see how this play progresses from here, because progress it most certainly should.