New play 37 uses the Adam Goodes saga to explore Australia’s enduring obsessions

Former Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes is not exactly the subject of Trawlwoolway, palawa/pakana writer Nathan Maynard’s new play 37, so much as the prism through which it refracts.

The play follows cousins Jayma (Ngali Shaw) and Sonny (Tibian Wyles) as they join the Currawongs, the football team representing a small coastal town, chasing its first-ever premiership. The team, under the management of a new coach (Syd Brisbane) known as the General — parallels between sport and the military abound in 37 — and thanks largely to its two new Indigenous recruits, has its best chance yet of glory as it progresses through the 2015 season.

The team gathers to watch the Swans vs Collingwood game in which Goodes celebrated a goal by performing a warrior dance at jeering opposition supporters before miming throwing a spear. At this point, the constituent parts of the play — the unspoken tensions around race, masculinity, responsibility and history — are splayed for all to see.

The layering of meaning occurs in the play as surely as it did in the real event. Goodes — already marked out a “whinger” for having called out a 13-year-old spectator who had called him an ape some years earlier — was booed wherever he went thereafter. This prompted books’ worth of columns about race in Australia. Much of it, led by Andrew Bolt and other tabloid columnists, argued that the targeting had nothing to do with race, that Goodes had brought it upon himself, that his mime had been an act of violence, and that he and others might foment a “race war”.

This national dialogue is played out in miniature in the locker room where 37 largely takes place. Jayma is accused of being divisive for his full-throated support of Goodes — he takes to wearing Goodes’ 37 Guernsey to training — while Sonny, who wearily and warily stays out of the arguments, is held up in direct contrast as an exemplary team player.

The double standards pile high. The General reacts violently to a joke made about his wife, while Jayma is expected to put a horrifyingly racist comment about his late father to one side for the good of the team. The teller of that joke retains his place — after a cultural sensitivity course, naturally — because “it wouldn’t sit right” with the General to leave a “soldier to the wolves” and kick him out. That he’s a very decent player, and that his family are wealthy pastoralists who sponsor the team, doesn’t hurt. Meanwhile Jayma’s and Sonny’s participation on the team is contingent not only on their talent but their behaviour.

On it goes: the primacy of protecting reputation over changing actual behaviour. The different meanings of words like “tradition”, “sacrifice”, “team” and “warrior”. Of what it means to “pay the price” for something. The different weight carried by the taking of offence depending on who purports to be offended.

For all its polemic, 37 is a generous and full-hearted piece of work. Apart from anything else, it’s desperately funny, and the dialogue fizzes with a kind of lyrical vulgarity: the General says that the Premiership Cup causes anything drunk from it to taste as though “an angel is pissing on your tonsils”. 

However, the play also depicts a partial view — if you want to hear a woman’s voice on any of these issues, this play won’t provide it — and just occasionally the players stray into unconvincingly terse and eloquent summations of social issues.

Still, the locker room hosts real human beings, whose relationships with the club, with each other, with race, feel like parts of full lives, lives that continue off-stage. Some characters are clumsy and well-meaning — say, during the “getting to know you” exercise, when players debate if it’s racist that they believe Sonny’s claim to be cousins with Cathy Freeman. Some are essentially decent until the Goodes saga butts up against their comfort zone. And some are revealed to be explicit, hateful racists.

The other reason 37 works is that it really gets sport, what sport is to the individuals who play, at whatever level, and those who watch it. The games are played out in choreography halfway between Indigenous traditional dance and ballet; the players are lifted and hang suspended, frozen in moments of serene grace. Spliced through the beauty is sport as an outlet for socially acceptable, contained violence; a brawl breaks out and rages until the siren goes. It instantly ceases, replaced with handshakes and a genial “good game”.

In its peak moments, football allows these men to work in concert, wordless, fluid and freed from the rigid moulds history has poured them into. But 37 makes clear that any absolution the game delivers can only be temporary. The siren eventually sounds, and the world comes seeping back in through the locker room door.