Much has been written about arts patrons John and Sunday Reed. Their crucial role in supporting Australia’s mid-century Modernist artists in particular. Their complex relationships with those creatives, who socialised, worked and sometimes lived at their bush property, Heide – now Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Much has been written, mostly fact, but also some speculation about the open love affairs and feuds among the Heide Circle’s brilliant, often volatile figures.

Nikki Shiels as Sunday Reed in the Melbourne Theatre Company production Sunday. Photo © Pia Johnson

A Melbourne Theatre Company commission originally scheduled for 2021, Anthony Weigh’s play joins in that speculation by imagining pivotal moments in Sunday Reed’s relationships with her husband John and her most famous lover, the artist Sidney Nolan.

It focuses on a key period in the 1940s, from Nolan’s arrival at Heide as a nobody, to his climactic break with the Reeds, and the passion and painting in between. Its dreamlike, episodic approach effortlessly takes us backwards and forwards in time. Along the way, it offers some often funny observations...