RBG: Of Many, One

Playwright Suzie Miller always wanted her good mate Heather Mitchell to play Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late legal firebrand of the US Supreme Court.   And Mitchell delivers a tour de force in Miller’s masterful new play.

Perfectly sustained for 90 minutes, it’s a riveting journey with RBG from age 13 to 87, with Mitchell also making split second shifts to voice 30 other characters, including three American Presidents.

As she waits feverishly by the phone for President Clinton to finish watching the basketball and appoint her, or not, to the highest court in the land, RBG remembers her Jewish childhood marked by grief and poverty, and her moving escape into opera. 

She rises quickly to being top student at law school (despite the Dean at Harvard asking, “why she wanted to occupy a seat that could be held by a man.”), and then significant civil rights achievements battling in court, just armed with the Constitution.

The rule of law, over everybody, is her road to equality. Mitchell’s often impish RBG is impassioned and witty but, when in her famously different judicial collars, she sticks to   rational argument and due process – and a firm belief in the division of the judiciary from the executive.  In one big mistake, the prospect of a vandal presidency under Trump drives her to speak out against him – and she must apologise.

Over lunch, Obama ever so gently explored whether she might retire, allowing him to squeeze in his Court appointment of a progressive woman – another language-rich masterpiece of a scene from Miller.  Perhaps RBG should have resigned – she died just weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, and Trump happily replaced her with a religious conservative.   

Suzie Miller’s play wonderfully splices this quick parade of scenes and characters, big and small, and memories, grand and domestic, and through it all, the most tender love affair RBG has with her husband.  The translucent Mitchell inhabits them all.  Her quicksilver shifts are finely supported by the clarity and focus of Alexander Berlage’s lighting and Paul Charlier’s beautiful sound.   Priscilla Jackson artfully directs clockwork changes of props and scenes, against David Fleischer’s sparse but enveloping design.  

Miller shares RBG’s passionate feminism and love of legal debate. And it’s central to her current huge success with Prima Facie, now moving from London to Broadway. Landmark cases advancing the rights of women are well-delineated in RBG: Of Many, One.  I missed, though, not going deeper into her feminism and politics by knowing of other, related civil rights cases, which in the Supreme Court motivated her famous RBG Dissenting Decisions. 

They may not be majority judgments, but RBG says she wrote them as a voice to the future.

Martin Portus

BUY THE PLAYSCRIPT

Photographer: Prudence Upton