The Heide Museum of Modern Art, established by arts patron Sunday Reed and her husband John, is located in Victoria. But for actor Nikki Shiels, who plays Sunday Reed in Sunday , the Anthony Weigh play opening at the Sydney Opera House this week, it isn’t just a Victorian story. It’s an Australian one.
“We have national figures in this show,” Shiels says. “I think it’s important to celebrate them, not fight over them.” As a 20-year-old art student, Nikki Shiels was blown away by her first visit to Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Credit: Steven Siewert Patron, philanthropist and so-called muse, Sunday Reed was at the centre in the 1940s and 50s of the Heide Circle, a close-knit and influential group of artists and bohemians that ushered in Australian modernism. They included Joy Hester, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. Shiels describes it as a “portal into a sensory, psychological inner life”.
Previously, she says, Sunday Reed “has been reduced in the National Gallery of Australia to ‘A gift from Sunday Reed’, the placard on the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series.” But that plaque is not insignificant in the life and times of Sunday Reed; audiences coming to the play will discover it represents a larger, more complex, and deeply engrossing story. Those famous Ned Kelly paintings appear as a plot point in the play (directed by Sarah Goodes for the Sydney Theatre Company), and so does Nolan, with whom Sunday had what Shiels describes as a “romantic entanglement.