Portrait of an icon: Goolagong's story writ large in Sunshine Super Girl

Sunshine Super Girl
★★★½
Sydney Town Hall
Reviewed January 9

Sunshine Super Girl transforms Sydney Town Hall into a tennis court, with traverse seating banks like bleachers. We sit down and are immediately ready for a match. What better mindset for a play about one of our greatest athletes, Evonne Goolagong Cawley?

Tuuli Narkle as Evonne Goolagong Cawley, with Kyle Shilling in Sunshine Super Girl.Credit: Yaya Stempler

This set (designed by Romanie Harper, lit by Karen Norris and the canvas for Mic Gruchy’s projected video) takes us everywhere – the clay courts at Barellan morph into lush Wimbledon green and beyond.

Writer Andrea James (who also directs) keeps the play in constant motion as we follow Evonne (the luminous Tuuli Narkle) through her life. The script is admirably efficient, hitting major milestones in a little under two hours: Evonne’s early obsession with tennis; childhood success in games across her beloved Wiradjuri Country; her move to Sydney to train under the watchful, slimy eye of Vic Edwards (Luke Carroll). Plus, there’s Wimbledon centre court, of course, and the Wimbledon Ball, where Evonne meets and falls for Roger Cawley (Kyle Shilling). The structure is near cinematic biopic, driven by image and moment to make a whole.

Carroll, Shilling, Jax Compton and Katina Olsen play a vibrant universe of characters (Compton delivers particularly enjoyable work as a raucous John Newcombe, among a host of others) and supplement storytelling with physical performance. Tennis is represented in dance and movement, but so too is family, ambition, and emotion. When an opponent addresses Evonne with a terrible slur, it’s as though the world stops turning; when she plays a match, the stage is alive with athletics.

James honours Evonne’s community, culture and people; this is a story about an individual who is not alone. James celebrates Evonne’s connection to country, and highlights the ongoing struggle and resilience of Australia’s First Nations people even as we zoom in on Evonne’s personal wins and losses. The 1965 Freedom Rides and the establishment of the tent embassy in Canberra serve as markers of time and as reminders of the complex, nearly impossible odds that Evonne endured from within the already challenging world of elite women’s sports.

This is a play that educates and uplifts, light entertainment with a bite of wit. While James can’t always land a scene – transitions and shifts in tone create awkward bumps of tension onstage that could be handled more smoothly, and the dance occasionally overwhelms the narrative clarity – the story of Evonne, and her extraordinary life, emerges proudly. A portrait of an icon.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.