Saturday Evening on the Harbour with Sunday

Last Friday was the start of the German winter festival known as ‘Yule’ and was also Friday the thirteenth - Teutonic darkness and spookiness combined. I know this because ABC’s Vanessa Hughes announced as much when I was on my way back from a meeting to discuss how our writers' group will survive un-funded for another year. Her choice of Grieg’s March of the Trolls was apposite but my sense of unease was not dispelled as I mused on the non-funding situation and the proximity of Christmas. 

So far my life this December has been uncluttered by tinsel and baubles. My new year resolution of not trying to force the ‘jolly’ has inhibited me from making any seasonal accommodations whatsoever. The only mince pie I have tasted was an organic one my spouse purchased from the local produce market with dry pastry and burnt filling that I deposited in the compost bin after one bite. Let’s hope the $1.50 individual Christmas puddings from Aldi are more edible! 

Extent of my Xmas preparations so far

As far as gift shopping goes, all I have bought so far are a couple of calendars and a Spike Milligan CD from a bric-a-brac shop in Coolamon. One of the calendars, Ugly Medieval Cats, was a gift for my friend of many years whom I caught up with in Sydney at the weekend.  She is a fan of medieval illumination and a cat fancier (though currently cat-less). Our main gift to ourselves though was dinner, conversation and seeing the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Sunday at the Sydney Opera House. 

We ate at one of the restaurants that line the foreshore where, true to our grumpy older women demographic, we challenged the waitress about the volume of Riesling in our glasses. She pointed out that we had mistaken a line in the restaurant’s logo design for the standard drink line level and laughingly pointed to the rim of the glass saying that’s where she’d pour up to ‘in my country’. Dinner, salmon fillets baked in banana leaves in spicy coconut cream  and served with ample firm broccolini spears, was delicious. Not so the overpriced, over sweet, but still bland gelato we purchased en route to the Opera House. Thank you, Saxenda for letting me bin this ice cream like I did the mince pie! 

Arriving at Circular Quay

Since my last visit, security screening has been introduced at the Opera House. The checkpoint had several staff clustered around it. One glanced at us, judged that we did not need to put our handbags on the conveyor belt and gestured that we could just walk through the detection arch. I set off the alarm and a dapper uniformed man in his early forties exclaimed ‘bag check’ at me. Unaware of the drill I hesitated momentarily and he barked the phrase twice more. I presented my bag to a young woman standing beside the conveyor belt; she rummaged and found nothing concluding that my glasses case had triggered the alarm. The confusion and inconclusiveness of the encounter led me to mutter ‘ridiculous’, at this the man fixed me with an officious stare and told me firmly ‘It is NOT ridiculous’. How I missed the affable front of house staff at Wagga’s Civic Theatre at that moment! If that wasn’t enough evidence of my incipient parochialism, at interval I crossed swords with a server on the refreshment counter who took so long to  comprehend my request for black tea with a splash of cold water that interval was almost over leading him to say ‘you know you can’t take it with you?’   I had heard that somewhere before. I don’t like to think that I am  a curmudgeon. When I related to my sister that Sam Neill was in the audience and that I had a brush with security she immediately thought I had to be restrained from pestering the star. That is the reputation I would prefer!

But to the play itself, Sunday – a play with a title to torture box office staff, for example when I asked if we could exchange our Wednesday tickets for Sunday to Saturday! It is named for Sunday Reed the wealthy unconventional philanthropist, art collector and arbiter and muse to Australian modernist apainters who, with her husband John, founded the artists’ retreat, Heide on a  dairy property on the banks of the Yarra in Bulleen, Victoria. Playwright Anthony Weigh has created Sunday as a fascinating, complex, sometimes vitriolic, sometimes vulnerable believable woman. Nikki Shiels brings his characterisation to life brilliantly. She is on stage for almost all of the play’s 140 minutes performing a role that is both heavy on pithy dialogue and physically demanding. It was a tour de force! 

L to R: James O'Connell as Sidney Nolan, Nikki Sheils as Sunday Reed and Matt Day as John Reed in the MTC's production of Sunday at the Sydney Opera House (source: https://www.stagenoise.com/review/2024/sunday)

Set in the 1930s-40s, Sunday traverses Sidney Nolan’s initial naïve meeting with the Reeds, his passionate affair with Sunday, his creation of the iconic Ned Kelly series and his eventual estrangement from his patrons.  Coincidentally I had seen the Ned Kelly series the weekend before at the NGA and had again marvelled at their skilful combination of iconography and truthful landscape and their penetrating evocation of the contradictions of the Australian psyche. Weigh’s writing about art is exceptional. Sunday’s description of The Slip (1947) Nolan’s painting depicting troopers in procession, outlaw  tracking, on a steep incline with a huge foregrounded horse that has lost its footing and fallen but remains suspended inverted for all time becomes a metaphor for the limbo, suffering and cruelty she and he are experiencing in their doomed relationship.

Sydney Nolan's The Slip (1947) from his Ned Kelly series 

This is only one of the many amazing translations of visual art qualities into dialogue that Weigh achieves.  I have never experienced writing that so vividly conveys the concepts and impact of visual art. If I have any qualms about the play they relate to the eccentric casting and costuming of the Joy Hester character and the underutilisation of both her and Sweeney’s character in the drama, but these are minor quibbles. Sunday was a wonderful (un-Christmassy) gift to ourselves!