It’s not every day the stage of Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse could be mistaken for the tennis stadium across the river, with a red hardcourt surface, white lines, a net and a set of bleachers filled with audience members. But the warm ambience of cicadas, Jimmy Little country tunes, and the gently percussive thock thock thock of a rally in the distance takes us to another time and country altogether.
We meet Evonne Goolagong Cawley (Ella Ferris) at home by the river, casting a line into the water. She loves fishing, she says, which can be a lot like tennis; catching a fish requires a sharp eye, every single muscle, and of course, knowing where the “sweet spot” is.
In Sunshine Super Girl, Yorta Yorta and Gunaikurnai writer-director Andrea James pays loving tribute to the Wiradjuri tennis champion and former Australian of the Year, who won 14 grand slam and 86 singles titles across the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a graceful, energetic production, honouring Goolagong Cawley’s life story while also capturing the feeling of vicariously basking in the glow of her on-court glory.
Ferris plays young Goolagong with wide-eyed wonderment, three years old in a boxy brown dress, careening around in a clapped-out car with her parents and two older siblings. When the family move to the New South Wales town of Barellan and Goolagong discovers their new house backs on to the local tennis courts, her excitement is infectious.
A kindly neighbour invites her to play, swaps her makeshift wooden bat for a racket, and she’s off, buoyed up by a groundswell of community support in the form of borrowed shoes, lifts to her next tournament and a collection can rattling in every shopfront.
There are some things, however, that set the Goolagongs’ lives apart from their white neighbours, from the constant threat of the black government car to the segregation that forces the Goolagong kids to sit in the front row at the movies, craning their necks up to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (“In colour!” young Goolagong gushes.)
Goolagong’s sense of wonder never really abates, even as she is thrust into a bigger, sometimes uncomfortable world. Plucked from local competitions by coach Vic Edwards (Kirk Page), she is brought to Sydney where everything is both quieter and louder – a city that hums incessantly under a starless sky.
The tennis court staging – a tour-friendly approximation of its original Sydney festival run, in which the entire audience sat in the stands – remains consistent throughout. It’s left to the costuming and soundtrack to nudge us through the 1960s and 1970s as the basslines get funkier and Ferris’ outfits evolve, from a homemade dress to the scalloped whites of a Wimbledon champion, to the Fila sportswear of early 80s. It’s all done with an exquisite light touch.
Ferris and several of her all-First Nations castmates have dance backgrounds, and movement is at the heart of the production, from the barefoot shuffle of her youth to her professional years, where every match becomes a choreographed dance. The ensemble put their whole bodies into it as they portray her family, her neighbours, her opponents – and even a few sheep.
It makes for a hypnotic spectacle; the white-clad bodies on red courts pirouette, tumble and roll, speeding up and slowing down to show the multitude of split-second calculations and careful movements that underpin each rally, and the physical and mental tug-of-war between each player.
Her growing fame also exposes her to a new range of micro- and macro-aggressions as she courts acceptance from the homogenous, elite tennis world (James extracts great mileage out of Wimbeldon’s dress code being “predominantly white”). Off court, excerpts from contemporary media reports show the strange suite of adjectives used to describe Goolagong, and the crowds and reporters who flock to the novelty of an Aboriginal tennis star.
The audience gasps in shock when a vanquished opponent (Katina Olsen, also the play’s movement coach) calls her the N-word, but the political subtext doesn’t overwhelm Goolagong’s story. When her activist friends beg her to take a stand and boycott a South African tournament, mocking her for being an “honourary white”, they might as well be trying to tug the play towards a darker, more didactic kind of production – and a neater history.
In another creative’s hands, perhaps it might have been – even Goolagong’s childhood hero turned doubles partner Margaret Court (Olsen again), who could have made for a crowd-pleasing antagonist given her recent contributions in the news cycle, is graciously portrayed. While Goolagong is certainly forced to rise above hardship and sacrifice – the lecherous advances of Edwards, her coach and surrogate father figure; the loss of her actual father; the challenges of a post-pregnancy comeback – the play never loses that sense of wonder. Goolagong plays for the people forced to sit up the back and the family crowding around the television back home. After all, it is called Sunshine Super Girl, and if that’s Goolagong’s truth, it’s her truth.
A late-in-the-game monologue threads the connections between her Country, her family, her sport and her future in a gentle but poignant way. It’s another moment where the movement, language, staging and performances are all working together, and the play, like its subject, finds its sweet spot.
Sunshine Super Girl is on at the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide until 17 September; then Queensland Performing Arts Centre as part of the Brisbane festival, 22-24 September; then Geelong Arts Centre, 5 October; and Melbourne Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre, 9 November–14 December.
