Unvarying sunshine
Sunshine Super Girl at the Melbourne Theatre Company is an adventurous and relentlessly upbeat portrayal of the life of Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
The Sumner theatre is arranged in traverse, which immediately signals that the Performing Lines production of Sunshine
Super Girl is not going to be your average Melbourne Theatre Company show. Written and directed by Andrea James and shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama, Sunshine Super Girl tells the story of legendary Wiradjuri Australian tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley. It has already toured the country, from Brisbane to Geelong, and it’s likely that this upbeat biography will continue to have a life long after this season, as it’s a joyful rags-to-riches tale that celebrates a great Australian during a time ripe with nostalgia.
A tennis court is laid out on the stage between the two halves of the audience.
The old-fashioned Dunlop tennis bags are a nice touch. Attention to detail is perhaps the first thing that catches my eye, in the design particularly. Goolagong Cawley’s tennis uniforms are lovingly recreated and matched from year to year and, though almost bare, the set’s few simple pieces and the props that suggest the tennis court – the net, the umpire’s seat – all look authentic.
Although it’s not immediately obvious, the light that marks out the court and the use of digital projections on the floor to set the scene are remarkable. As with many aspects of this production, the lighting, projection and design are subtle but striking at the same time. They don’t announce their arrival like SFX or spectacle: instead they appear and support the scene, transporting the players and the audience from grass court to clay court to the running river at Goolagong Cawley’s hometown of Barellan.
The lights stay up on us in the audience as the performers enter the court one by one, doing stretches, prepping for the game ahead and acknowledging the audience’s presence. This is where the pre-show applause happens, welcoming each of the actors to the stage in the same way real players are applauded onto the court. The audience enters the conceit here, casting themselves as spectators, and it feels playful and inclusive.
That feeling of connection carries through the whole evening. Ella Ferris as Goolagong Cawley addresses the audience throughout. She tells us her life story from her childhood to the heights of her career, leading us along with asides, smiles and winks. Ferris’s smile lights up the entire stage, radiating goodness from beginning to end.
As a work of drama, it’s not the most varied of productions. It’s certainly true that First Nations storytellers making work for predominantly non-first Nations audiences often find that their material is expected to exploit their trauma to educate or, worse, to entertain. Sunshine Super Girl is an excellent example of the myriad other possible narratives. Though Goolagong Cawley’s story is not entirely plain sailing, the play doesn’t dwell on traumatic moments. They are there but they are never unpacked and don’t affect the relentlessly positive mood of the piece.
As a result, despite the collegial atmosphere, I feel held at arm’s length. Good drama tends not to prosper under relentless tragedy or comedy – but it does benefit from swinging between the two.
For much of the time the text is a monologue, Goolagong Cawley addressing us directly, recounting the incidents of her life, supported by a chorus of players who take up the roles of people around her: her family, friends, teammates, trainers and supporters. They also carry out the movement work that is arguably the heart of this production. From the outset the actors work the entire space, using their bodies to create mood, signal environmental shifts and embody a range of characters. It’s wonderful to see so much physical expression on stage at the
MTC which, for better or worse, often finds itself grounded in a representative mode that imitates reality. Sunshine Super Girl employs a blend of dance and physical theatre to heighten the storytelling, lifting what might be a prosaic hagiography into a ritualised celebration of its subject’s rise and triumph.
Andrea James’s direction is infused with a wealth of metatheatrical connections. For instance, in the training scenes and the close analysis of a particular shot in a game, the actors go through a step-bystep deconstruction of the action in the moment. One actor is the player, marking the movements and split-second decisions, while another curls up their fist to be the approaching ball. At the conclusion, they step back to the beginning and start the process again, faster this time. Then again and again until the movement is fluid and Goolagong Cawley steps into the position of the player.
Watching this, I can’t help thinking of the robot-like repetition in Pina Bausch’s Café
Müller. Likewise, they way the actors use their hands and arms to make bursts of dust when a tennis ball hits a clay court, showing the trajectory of where the ball has gone, reminds me of Legs On The Wall’s more physical work from the early 2000s. And the Margaret Court ballet section – complete with diamond tiara and a swirling, cut-diamond lighting effect – feels like a gentle reminder that Big Marg has latterly developed a reputation as something of homophobe.
Despite all this, Sunshine Super Girl is not without its flaws. There’s an impression of tennis contemporary John Newcombe that leans a little too far into a drag king-style parody of masculinity, which, while funny, doesn’t feel earned for a such minor character appearance. It’s a little disappointing that in 2022 we’re still getting a cheap giggle out of seeing a male-presenting actor putting on a skirt to play a silent doubles partner.
Of more fundamental concern is the pacing and dramaturgical invariance of the whole. Cheerful and affirming is one thing but there is a curious lack of stakes throughout the telling of Goolagong Cawley’s story. Even at moments of potential high drama – when she is called the N-word by a competitor, when her friends challenge her for playing in South Africa during apartheid, when her coach makes inappropriate advances and when her father dies – the text breezes through and charges on. There’s never a moment to sit with the shocking events, no time to see how they impact Goolagong Cawley, no evidence that they change her at all, no chance to feel them ourselves and no real consequences.
At the beginning of the play Goolagong Cawley asks, why her? At the end, she answers this with, “Why not?” It feels emblematic of the show’s lack of dramatic tension – “Why not?” isn’t an answer. We’ve just seen the answer over two hours. Why her? Because she was focused, disciplined and determined, and she had the support of her family, her home town and the tennis community.
A problem with most biographical works, especially when the person is still alive, is that a dramaturgy of listing takes over, turning a life story into a roll call of accomplishments. Sunshine Super Girl suffers a little from this. But it’s not enough to detract from the ebullient performances, the visually arresting movement and the communal good feeling generated by the sunshine super girl at the centre.
Sunshine Super Girl is playing at The Sumner, Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, until December 14.