Faces of Joy

A play about life, death, art and the joy that love can bring

Based on the letters and poems of Joy Hester to Sunday Reed .

Directed by Ken Radley
Featuring Teresa Bell

Joy Hester was many things - an artist’s artist, a loving mother, the only female member of the Angry Penguins, Melbourne’s radical coterie of the War years, and the wife of Albert Tucker. Sunday Reed was her closest friend, a wealthy and charismatic patron of the Arts.

Joy Hester’s letters to Sunday, and her correspondence with other great thinkers and artists of that time such as Barrett Reid, John Perceval, the Boyds, Sidney Nolan and Max Harris, chart the ebb and flow of her creativity, parenting and poverty as well as heated intellectual and artistic debates. They also contain Joy’s search for love, her bravery with hodgkins disease and as a woman taking her life in her own hands and finding such a place, that she could be creative and happy.

Faces of Joy charts a search for happiness in love and in work and a woman who made very brave choices a both a woman and a mother. Faces of Joy focuses on Joy as an Artist - her determination to find her own space to develop as an artist, and her identification with the Australian country.

Schools Presentation Friday 9 June at 10am
Twilight Event Sunday 11 June at 5pm

VENUE 

The Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale
(West Cambewarra, via Illaroo Rd)