sunday reed

What happens when we see real events and meet well-known people on stage? How can the theatre shape our sense of our own history? Those questions are raised by a new Australian play called Sunday. It features a knockout performance from Nikki Shiels as the famous Australian arts patron Sunday Reed.

Also, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage is renowned for her incisive, moving and witty plays about the intersections of race and class in America. The playwright joins us to reflect on her storied career and how her work taps into larger political conversations. This year, the Sydney Theatre Company will stage her play Sweat.

What happens when we see real events and meet well-known people on stage? Can the theatre shape our sense of our own history? Those questions are raised by a new Australian play called Sunday. It features a knockout performance from Nikki Shiels as arts patron Sunday Reed.

Also, we're joined by the writer of Sunday, Anthony Weigh, to discuss what responsibilities artists have to truth and accuracy in stories based on actual events, and we continue our discussion of Australian history and theatre with the writer of a new play inspired by the shocking true events that rendered an Australian town uninhabitable.

Few people can lay claim to changing a city forever – it's food, art and culture – but Mirka Mora can. The Holocaust survivor fled war-torn France for Australia in 1951. Together with her husband, Georges, she brought a cosmopolitan sensibility and aesthetic missing from dour, provincial Melbourne. In a 60-year artistic career she painted on canvases big and small and collaborated with everyone from VicRail to fashion designers Gorman. Mirka's life reflected her art: bold, energetic and colourful. A new exhibition of  Mirka's work tells both her life story and  legacy through paintings, sound recordings and film. William Mora, her son and art dealer, joined us to discuss the exhibition and remember his late mother.