Actor Nikki Shiels is just a few hours away from her first public performance as Sunday Reed, the heroine of Melbourne Theatre Company’s season-opening production, Sunday.
“I’m only now starting to feel the weight of it,” she tells Limelight. “I’ve been pretty fortunate to have the scope to inject my imagination and my interest into this character, but Sunday Reed is such an important and celebrated part of Australian culture. So yes, I really feel that weight of expectation from the art lovers, the historians, all the people who come to the show with ideas of who Sunday should be.”
Nikki Shiels as Sunday Reed in the Melbourne Theatre Company production Sunday. Photo © Pia Johnson
Shiels has been able to draw on the plentiful published writings on Sunday Reed and the circle of artists that gravitated to the former dairy farm she shared with her artist husband John Reed from the mid 1930s to their deaths in December 1981. The farm became known as “Heide”. It is now Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art.
“The cultural...
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