Sydney Reviews

Renowned Australian artist, Albert Tucker recollected that Sunday Reed was a very sensitive woman, very penetrating, full of insight and quite ruthless and quite manipulative. And she had a side to her that was extremely childish. She was only interested in dramas when she was choreographing them for her own personal benefit.

Playwright Anthony Weigh has certainly puts those attributes and traits front and centre in his splendid script, Sunday, although Tucker himself is given rather short shrift in the play, mentioned many times as a perpetually angry man, somewhat a hindrance to Joy Hester’s ascension into the Australian art scene in the decades before and after the Second World War.

Hester and Nolan were John and Sunday Reed’s most favoured artists, and while Joy makes an appearance in the play, it is Nolan and his creative and carnal collaboration with Sunday that supplies the spine of the story.

The Reeds needed a talented young artist at the centre of their lives and Nolan needed their particular style of enlightened patronage. Fledgling and floundering, Nolan was given focus by Sunday, a mentoring of monumental scale.

Nikki Shiels is sensational as Sunday, depicting a very sexual woman, seductive, flirtatious, and possessive, a trait at times contrary to the libertine, hedonistic and bohemian spirit she so devoutly espoused. It is a constantly percolating performance, a bravura brew of buzzing effervescence.

In beautifully crafted counterpoint, Matt Day plays her husband, John Reed, a man who worshipped Sunday and would do anything to make her happy, including being the gracious, complicit cuckold in an awkward menage a trois.

James O’Connell as Nolan is all blustering bravado, a latent visionary, yet captive of the prevailing patriarchy. His conventional male possessiveness dispossesses the very object of his desire. 

Anna Cordingly’s set is a massive frame, the top architrave serving as a surface where the dates of the action are projected. In the second act it visually blooms into a spectacular autumnal garden.

Erratic, erotic, exotic, energetic and ever entertaining, Sunday is a study of a paradise lost, an Eden displaced by the serpent of envy and pride and a slate of human frailty and failing, yet a garden where great Australian art was created, eternal and enduring.

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