Ashes of passion
Sunday, Melbourne Theatre Company’s drama about Heide’s artistic circle, risks erasing history in favour of sentimental romance.
In the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Sunday, art patron and Melbourne bohemian Sunday Reed and emerging artist Sidney Nolan stand before an unnamed Picasso presented at the groundbreaking Degenerates and Perverts exhibition at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1939.
The socialite tells the painter: “If you had any nous in you, you’d stand in front of this painting for a long time. A really long time. Absorb its colour, its field, the tension between the figure and the frame, the way it’s more than one thing at a time. Two things. Four. Five. Fifty. How it can’t be separated into ideas, images.”
Sarah Goodes’s three-hour production of Anthony Weigh’s play, however, struggles with the same task. As a first gesture in artistic director Anne-louise Sarks’s first season at the Melbourne Theatre Company, the choice of a story that centres an often overlooked Australian cultural icon is promising. However, Sunday is hard work in many different ways: as a character, as a subject and as a production to watch.
The set is a four-sided box that frames every moment like a painting. In a black oblong stretching the length of the grey back wall is the word “Sunday.” The full stop at the end gives me pause: in that tiny but definitive detail lies a wealth of misgivings.
Weigh tells the story of Sunday Reed and her pursuit of an uncompromising lifestyle based on passion and creation. Daughter of the wealthy Baillieu family, fiercely intelligent and uncowed by the social conventions of 1930s high society, Sunday and her lawyer husband, John, establish Heide, an artists’ commune of sorts, on the far-flung edges of northern Melbourne. The couple renovate a run-down house and invite the young talents of the Melbourne art world to live with them on the property, offering them board, food and materials as patronage in an atmosphere of alcohol, cigarettes and modern jazz. Here they redefine Australian painting under the unerringly brilliant criticism of Sunday herself. Here Sunday has an affair with Sidney Nolan, inspiring his greatest works and all but destroying herself in the process.
The more I reflect on Anna Cordingley’s set, the more beautiful I think it is. Ash-grey clouds fill the sky. Streaks of white shaft through them, like sunlight through the ash rain of a bushfire. This, then, is an aftermath. This is what’s left after the passions of the painters and patrons who made their home at Heide are spent. The set’s Brutalist angles and drab concrete-grey reflect the architecture of the Reeds’ second home, the “gallery to be lived in”, Heide II. Paul Jackson’s lighting plays subtly across it throughout, giving it now the feeling of crepuscular sunlight seen deep in the old masters, now the ethereal light found in an Australian Impressionist dawn.
While this story is inspired by real people and events, Sunday is offered to us as a “fantasy of life at Heide”. But whose fantasy is it? This Sunday is an iconoclast, resolute and imperturbable. She sees through pretence with a dissecting eye and is determined to assert herself as an authority on her own merits rather than as an adjunct to her husband. Nevertheless, she’s still undone by her passions – her relationship with Nolan ends in acrimony and resentment and Sunday is reduced to a broken woman. In the final scene she can’t even finish her own thoughts, giving them over to her husband to complete for her as the lights fade.
Is this Sunday’s fantasy? Is this her dream of how she might be in a perfect world, a “paradise”, as Nolan calls Heide, where nothing matters but passion? If so, then it’s the fantasy of a fantasy. This is a Disney princess version of Sunday, which lets any potential insight into her character, or any critique of social mores and cultural capital, slip away into irrelevance.
Structural flaws in the writing weaken its impact. Jokes don’t land as hard as “bad language” does, which is used in a confusingly inconsistent way, as if the characters keep remembering they can swear. Sections that feature rhythmical repetition don’t feel like living back and forth language: instead the dialogue tumbles over itself with “whats?” and “doolallies”, presumably because “that’s how people talk”.
This Sunday is, as she says herself, a monster. She toys with and mocks John Reed and Nolan constantly and mercilessly. Superficially, this lends her an easy aspect of superiority: she is not one to be trifled with, especially in a match of wits. But the relentlessly unbalanced play of status between the three makes Sunday seem cruel rather than strong: she surrounds herself with lesser men and makes herself feel big by punching down on her inferiors.
This leaves the performers with shells to fill, rather than characters to become.
Nikki Shiels plays Sunday with a Katharine Hepburn vibe that brooks no nonsense but evinces little character development, making a leap between acts to return as a heartbroken Gloria Swanson-lite. It’s a waste of a frankly great talent. Matt Day as a hapless John Reed reminds me of Richard Briers in The Good Life, and Josh Mcconville as Sidney Nolan has a shambling “Aussie battler” quality that makes me think of Barney without Roo in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
The real story of Sunday Reed is more fascinating and tragic than the confection presented to us by Weigh. This is where
I return to the full stop after the word “Sunday”, the definitive point that turns a word into a statement. As we leave the theatre,
I hear people around me saying things like, “I never knew that about her” and “Was that what they were really like?”
Without demanding fidelity to historical realism, this is a problem because the simplicity of narratives tends to overwrite the messiness of truths. The real Sunday struggled with depression over her inability to have children; in this production you’d be forgiven for thinking she was only heartbroken over Nolan. The real Sunday and John adopted Sweeney Reed after his mother, Joy Hester, was diagnosed with lymphoma and couldn’t look after the boy anymore. This production makes him seem like an afterthought, one that Sunday is prepared to lightly dismiss if it will bring Nolan back.
When we still so rarely tell new stories about Australia, a fantasy that only looks like the real thing risks erasing our history to create a sentimental romance.
During the first act, Sunday critiques Nolan’s developing work. “Your birds and moons and trees and crazy doll-like women and funny little toy soldiers and wild-eyed rabbits,” she says. “Cramming them all into the frame.” I find myself wondering about those crazy doll-like women too. A little later in the same scene, Sunday asks: “But what’s she doing? This doll-like woman. What does she want? ... If she’s just stuck in the bloody frame with a crescent moon, a wild-eyed rabbit and a roller-coaster, for Christ’s sake, we can’t tell anything about her, can we? We want to know who she is.”
I agree wholeheartedly. We want to know who Sunday Reed is. I’m not convinced this play is a good way to find out. There is a great story buried here – and even a good play. It just doesn’t quite pull off Picasso’s – and Nolan’s – trick of being more than one thing at a time. Or two. Four. Five. Fifty… •
Sunday is playing at Southbank Theatre until February 18.