By Nick Dent
37
Bille Brown Theatre, until May 4
★★★★
The Adam Goodes affair revealed that Australians’ love of their non-white sporting heroes can be grotesquely conditional.
Nathan Maynard’s new play, 37, a co-production of Queensland Theatre with the Melbourne Theatre Company, explores the impact of Goodes’ treatment on a low-tier AFL team that has drafted two Indigenous players.
Ngali Shaw and Tibian Wyles in Melbourne Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre’s 37.Credit: Pia Johnson
It’s a ribald and rousing comedy that earns its place in the pantheon of AFL-themed plays about recruits, such as Alan Hopgood’s And the Big Men Fly (1963) and David Williamson’s The Club (1977).
Maynard, a Trawlwoolway man from Larapuna country in north-east Tasmania, brings to his script the insight that AFL was inspired by the Indigenous game marngrook, in which players used a stuffed possum-skin ball and executed leaps similar to the high mark.
Maynard and Noongar director Isaac Drandic (this is the fifth collaboration between the two) have staged football scenes that bleed into dreamlike sequences utilising Indigenous dance, which Drandic has co-choreographed with Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Waangenga Blanco.
The two charismatic heroes, Jayma (Ngali Shaw) and Sonny (Tibian Wyles), are Aboriginal cousins offered contracts with the Cutting Cove Currawongs, a regional team that has languished at the bottom of the rankings for 20 years but by 2015 has improved its prospects with the hiring of inspirational coach the General (Syd Brisbane).
Syd Brisbane and the cast of 37: choreography channels the cellular intelligence and athleticism of sport.Credit: Pia Johnson
Jayma brings with him the weight of generational expectation – his late father was the Currawongs’ last great hope – while Sonny is a late-blooming talent who also happens to need the money.
The Currawongs are not rednecks, but they are uncouth and rowdy, making the usual mistakes and assumptions of the young and ignorant as they get to know their new teammates. And there is one truly bad apple in this barrel of well-meaning boofheads: Woodsy (Eddie Orton), a seventh-generation player whose sense of entitlement and seething prejudice become apparent, first in joking remarks and later in the revelation of his deeply held beliefs.
“He’s just a loudmouth kookaburra,” reasons the pragmatic Sonny. “Who listens to the kookaburra? Not the warrior.”
Jayma, however, soon finds his golden-boy status slipping with his painted-on smile. And when the team gathers to watch the fateful Swans v Collingwood game, where Goodes mimed throwing a spear at opposition supporters, things come to a head.
Has the testosterone level ever been this high at the Bille Brown Theatre? 37’s cast of 10 ocker blokes allows the play to dive deep into the homosocial rituals of Aussie rules to frequently funny effect.
An initiation rite Jayma and Sonny are put through seems like a red flag, but ends up as simply hilariously off-colour.
The team’s various drills, such as star jumps, burpees, chest bumps and heel sprints, give the play a powerful physicality. It’s filthy one instance, elegiac and poetic the next – Chariots of Fire meets the frat house.
Music and sound by James Henry and Will Hughes are evocative, while Dale Ferguson’s set design – a locker room overlooked by Currawong spirits – encapsulates both the inspiration and perspiration of sporting life.
Flying high: the cast of Nathan Maynard’s 37.Credit: Pia Johnson
Despite a brief 90-minute runtime, the entire cast manages to make an impression, but a shoutout is due for Syd Brisbane’s coach – a prancing chicken hawk who alternately channels the hectoring drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and the benevolent Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights.
As Woodsy, Eddie Orton’s performance is hateful but nuanced. The broadly comedic work of hirsute Mitchell Brotz as Gorby, more like a team mascot than an actual player, also deserves mention.
Everyone loves a good underdog story and as the Currawongs climb the ladder, 37 plays into the tropes of feel-good sporting films. But it comes with a sting in the tail, asking: where does good-natured sledging end and hate speech kick in? And does the hyper-masculinity of the sporting field make it difficult to see the difference?