Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George contains a song titled Children and Art, about legacy, progeny and the creative urge. It could stand as an alternative title to this magnificent new play about Sunday Reed, her great loves and the mark she left on Australian art.
Playwright Anthony Weigh has taken key facts of Reed’s life – her deep love of husband and fellow art patron John; her tempestuous and fateful affair with painter Sidney Nolan; the establishment of Heide as a crucible of Australian modernism – and spun a complex and moving portrait of a woman who railed against conformity and tradition, but was snagged on matters of the heart.
