Pippa – the feisty but sentimental younger sister
Wal – representing the old Australia that gets away with its violent past through its infective jingoism, embracing your own cultural stereotype
Edwin – blindly intelligent and culturally bewildered
Troy – the truth-seeker and heartbreaking hope-giver
Dick – the belligerent, topsy-turvy patriot? Or perhaps you are Marge – keenly entertaining them all, just trying to enjoy the art?
Hotel Sorrento explored some immediately identifiable terrain for many audiences when it first appeared. It tapped the theme of Australian ‘cultural cringe’, the contested ownership of cultural and personal stories and conflict over entitlement and betrayal. Rayson the playwright …show more content…
In the early 1950s a new idea of cultural cringe was circulating around, which Australians were said to be. Cultural cringe coined in Australia after the Second World War, it explored ingrained feelings of inferiority that local intellectuals struggled against. It was clearly noticeable in the Australian theatre, music, art and letters. Australians and others believed that australians suffered a cultural cringe in relation to Britain. This is because before the 1950’s many people including Australians considered Australia to be nothing more than British colony. Which meant Australia was a nation whose national identity was relatively indistinct from the British. During this period of Australia’s history, our modes of entertainment, food, fashion, sporting culture and our social values and attitudes were largely dictated by British culture. It was thought that the only way local arts professionals could build themselves up in public esteem was either to follow overseas fashions, or, more often, to spend a period of time working in Britain. As work produced by Australian writers, artists, musicians, actors and dramatists suffered by comparison against the work of their British and European counterparts. Now Australia has a pretty powerful sense of self and this issue is less noticeable