Tour de force: The power of one with RBG
US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force of nature and Australian playwright Suzie Miller pays tribute to her with Heather Mitchell owning the stage as the woman they called RBG.
The same qualities that made US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg one of the greatest and most singular legal minds of her era – rapier intelligence, dogged tenacity and boundless empathy – are arguably the very same traits that make Heather Mitchell one of the finest actors working in Australia today.
So it comes as no surprise, then, to learn that the role of Ginsburg in the play RBG: Of Many, One – returning to Queensland for a season at HOTA on the Gold Coast in early April after a sellout season at QPAC last year – was written especially for Mitchell by Prima Facie playwright (and trained lawyer) Suzie Miller.
Born out of a conversation the two shared during the COVID epidemic, while sipping socially distanced tea and discussing Ginsburg’s recent death, the play features Mitchell playing not only Ginsburg but 25 other major figures who played key roles in her life story.
Each of the play’s three acts also has her voicing three distinctly different US presidents – Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
“I remember we were sitting, masked, talking about Ruth’s life and the extraordinary impact she had,”
Mitchell recalls. “Suzie, of course, being a lawyer, had such insights into Ruth’s judicial career and I knew a lot more about her personal life, having done a lot of reading about her. I remember I said to Suzie, ‘Gosh, you know, I’d really love to play her’, and Suzie just said, ‘Well, I’ll write it for you’,” Mitchell recalls during an interview from her home in Sydney.
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“Within about three months she had written the first draft and she sent it to me, asking me what I thought of it. I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe what she’d come up with. I’m just so grateful that she wrote the piece and to have it written for me is something I still struggle to express.
“Then, of course, came the role itself and the preparation and the deep diving, the reading. Ruth was just so wonderful and she’s a gift for any actor. Having the wealth of information about the breadth of her life and what she did was wonderful.”
Mitchell, who has built an enviable career on Australian stages and screens since graduating from the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art in the 1980s, clearly feels a deep kinship with Ginsburg, a woman whose life strangely shares eerie parallels with her own.
Ginsburg and Mitchell both married men called Marty, had American fathers and lost their Jewish mothers after long illnesses before the age of 20, had two children and survived cancer.
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‘We had a great deal in common, it turned out, and that both surprised me and comforted me’
For Mitchell, who never met Ginsburg but “feels, strangely, almost as though I did”, these parallels came to profoundly inform and shape her deeply felt and mesmeric performance in this Sydney Theatre Company production.
“We had a great deal in common, it turned out, and that both surprised me and comforted me,” she says. “She was still living in a time when women struggled much more in the workplace, but I’m in my 60s now and she was in her 60s when she moved onto the Supreme Court. The parallels really struck me. It’s a weird thing but, as I am getting older, I do feel as though my life is making much more sense to me.
“Her personal life informed her judicial life deeply and the two coexisted side-by-side. As I get older, as I survive more, I am realising that there’s something very gratifying about finding yourself in the position of having opportunities where you can use experiences you’ve been through, accepted and processed, and no longer see as a great tragedy or something to work through, in a creative way. There’s something very beautiful and very rewarding in that.”
The deftness and clarity of Miller’s writing and the immediacy and power of Mitchell’s performance both imbue RBG: Of Many, One with a very real sense of Ginsburg during the 27 years she spent on the Supreme Court – her loathing for hypocrisy and prejudice, her reverence for detail, her formidable dedication and her great empathy.
“Ruth, I think, did not suffer fools gladly, and I admire that about her enormously, but she also suffered enormously herself and I think that probably also informed the kind of legal mind that she was,” Mitchell says. “I feel very lucky to have this opportunity to play her.
“Whenever I am onstage, playing her, I feel as though I am sort of communing with her and I appreciate that feeling more now than ever because her legacy on the Supreme Court seems in such danger with the re-election of Trump and the erosion of abortion rights and women’s rights, more generally, in the US.”
RBG: Of Many, One plays HOTA, Surfers Paradise, April 3 to 5.