The Play: Sunday
The Theatre: The Sumner Theatre for the Melbourne Theatre Company
Playing until 18 February.
Stars: 4
Sunday provides an imagined history of Australian art luminaries Sunday and John Reed and Sidney Nolan during the Heide years. I say imagined as nobody will ever know what went on at Heide all those years ago - we can only make suppositions and enjoy the outcome. Nobody can be sure if Sunday and Nolan had an affair. Nobody can know what was actually said and done.
But this play gives it a crack.
Having a rudimentary knowledge of the Heide School helped to gain a bit of ground on this play - although going in cold would be find. John and Sunday Reed were arts patrons from the forties onward. They were the patrons of many artists including Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, John Perceval and most notably Sidney Nolan, who did, indeed, paint most of his Ned Kelly series on their dining room table. The Heide Art Museum is testament to the movement. Indeed, taking a tour of the house gives you a good appreciation of the Reeds and what they did for Australian Art.
So, the simple premise of this play is to look at the dynamics of the relationships between Sunday and Nolan, and how this impacts all in their orbit. It's really that simple.
The play uses an effective stripped-down arena to do this justice. A table brought in here and there bed and a lounge room on rotation for some scenes. In the end, there's a bit more going on, and that is fine.
This is wordy play. Running at just under three hours (with a 20 minute interval) you do need to keep awake to stay on top of what is going on. Time did not drag either. There's one speech of John's which has the audience clapping at one stage. It is also a very Melbourne play, poking fun at a lot of very in Melbourne standards including the weather, the "what school did you go to" conversations and a lot of other Melbourne standard tropes that nobody can escape from.
This is Nikki Sheils play. She's wonderful as the complicated, contrary, passionate Sunday. I've seen here in three things over the last few years and she's luminescent in everything she's done (Particulary in Girls and Boys and The Picture of Dorian Gray.) She's a joy to watch and she goes from taking Sunday from a young, recently divorced twenty-something to a woman in her forties struggling with some unidentified mental illness.
Matt Day was great as the long-suffering John Reed, although, for me, he's forever Harry-Sorry-David in Rake. Josh McConville is also solid as Sidney Nolan, his levelness and ambition is a decent foil for Sunday's bohemian nature. Ratidzo Mambo and Joshua Tighe round out the cast. Mambo's casting was interesting as she played Joy Hester. On discussions with my theatre companion, they found her inclusion difficult (Black actress playing a white woman). For me, her casting was not worth thinking about - blind casting is all over the shop now - it's not worth thinking about and Mambo did a great job in her role.
In all, this is a solid start to the MTC's 2023 season. Is it the best thing I've seen them produce? No. But it is a quality play which contains quality performances, and it was very enjoyable. It's well worth a look.
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