Actor Mike Smith is returning to his home town of Queanbeyan in a touring production of Hannie Rayson's award-winning 1990 play Hotel Sorrento. It's significant for three reasons: the show marks HIT Productions 100th production in 20 years, and it was also marked the company's debut in 1998. And Smith is in the role of Dick he saw himself playing when he first read Hotel Sorrento as a student at the Nationl Institute of Dramatic Art.
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"It fell into my lap - the guy cast in the role was unable to do the tour," he says.
In Hotel Sorrento, the three Moynihan sisters who grew up in the seaside town of Sorrento are reunited, having not seen each other for 10 years. Hilary (Ruth Caro) lives in the family home, working at a cafe and taking care of her her teenage son Troy (Saxon Gray) and elderly, widowed father Wal (Dennis Coard). Pippa (Joanne Booth), who works in advertising, returns from New York and Meg (Kim Denman), a successful writer, arrives from London with her husband Edwin (Dion Mills).
Meg's book Melancholy, nominated for the Booker Prize, is a source of contention for her sisters, who see it as a thinly veiled portrait of their own family's story and as such a betrayal and an invasion of privacy. Issues of ownership and betrayal and memory are all in the mix as the three sisters hash it out.
But the novel doesn't just remain a family matter.
"Dick is the antagonist," Smith says. A journalist who runs an independent newspaper, The Australian Voice, he has a friend in Sorrento named Marge (Jenny Seedsman). She introduces him to Melancholy. When they discover the real-life connection they do some investigative work and meet the Moynihans, with Dick sensing the whole thing would make a good story.
"Dick wants to go on an investigative path and pick Meg's brain."
But the scene is also set for other conflicts besides those in the family itself.
"We come in and stir things up," Smith says of his character and Seedsman's.
Dick and Meg start arguing over Australia's alleged "cultural cringe" with Meg saying it's still very much present, with the country still dominated by sport and alcohol and having little more to its cultural landscape.
Dick counters that things have changed in the past decade, Australia has developed its own unique identity, and as Meg has been living abroad all that time, she has no way of knowing what's gone on in this country.
"It leaves the audience hanging," Smith says - people can make up their own minds which side they support on this frequently discussed issue.
And there's plenty else that arises, revelations that take place and old memories that resurface as the story unfolds.
"One of the themes of the play is loyalty versus truth," Smith says. Some of the characters prize the former more while others believe the latter should be paramount.
He thinks that Rayson views social and political issues through the prism of personal and domestic dramas as a source of conflict - here centred on the sisters and their family in the Sorrento home and introducing a few interlopers to shake things up a bit.
Smith last performed at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre in 2014 in a very different role, playing Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps. He started doing local theatre in 1998, both musicals and plays with Canberra Repertory Society, before being accepted into NIDA and going on to a professional career that's included the TV shows Winners and Losers and All Saints as well as stage and voiceover work.
Hotel Sorrento. By Hannie Rayson. Directed by Denny Lawrence. HIT Productions. Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre. July 18 to 21. theq.net.au.