Sydney Theatre Company show RBG: Of Many, One starring Heather Mitchell is a one-woman tour de force

Most of us would consider it a throwaway comment if a friend casually said during conversation they would write a play for them.

Even if you are Australian screen and stage stalwart Heather Mitchell talking to your very dear friend, former human rights lawyer and Olivier award-winning playwright Suzie Miller.

“Our children have grown up together and I’ve always championed her plays,” Mitchell says.

“She’s written many, many plays that didn’t see the light of day in Australia but were often performed overseas. Prima Facie was the first one of hers that really got some traction.

“We were sitting talking one day about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It was after her death and we were sort of just discussing what an extraordinary woman she was, and the effect that she’d had and how much the world had changed. I said that I’d been reading about her personal life, and how it really resonated with me, and Suzie said ‘I’ll write you a play’ and she just did.

“When someone says something like that, you don’t know if they’re being serious, but she was and I’m very indebted to her for that, very grateful because it’s a wonderful piece of writing.”

RBG: Of Many, One, is a one-woman tour de force and an intimate theatrical portrait of the indomitable Ruth Bader Ginsburg — the woman who changed the face of the American legal system — spanning her life from age 13 until her death in September 2020 at 87 years old.

A trailblazer in the American judiciary, she was the second woman appointed to the US Supreme Court and a fierce advocate for gender equality and reproductive rights, reaching pop culture icon status when given the moniker The Notorious RBG, a play on late rapper The Notorious B.I.G.

The first season of the show, in 2022, was wildly popular, selling out performances that often ended in a standing ovation. This year’s show had its Sydney season extended to meet overwhelming demand before it embarks on a tour that finishes at the Heath Ledger Theatre in June.

Mitchell plays all 33 characters as the production is divided into three main sections featuring three presidents during her time on the US Supreme Court — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“The first act is her relationship with Clinton where she’s waiting for the phone call from Clinton, and her relationship with her husband Marty, which was a huge love affair,” Mitchell explains.

“The second act is her relationship with Obama and the third is her relationship with Trump and the anguish that it really caused her speaking out against Trump because she went against what she believed in, which was never to speak out on political issues. She feels great shame about it.

“The play is so beautifully constructed where there’s so much hope in the first act and then as the play goes on, there’s sort of all this strategising and very clever thinking in the middle. Then the last part is very much about reflecting on life, looking at one’s actions and what makes up a life.”

The scenes between Bader Ginsburg and Obama were the first thing that jumped out at Mitchell on her initial read of the script, as they discussed whether she would retire from the bench.

It is a wonderful back and-forth between them, similar to a tennis or chess match, while they avoid the topic and talk about it at the same time.

“What excited me about it was the brilliance of her mind and how she’s such a phenomenal listener as she gathers information and knows how to play the right move,” Mitchell says.

“She has great integrity and great commitment to her ideas. I just got terribly excited about how she thinks and her values and the influences that made her who she was. One of the greatest influences was her mother, who really ingrained in her very fundamental approaches to life.

“Right through her life she gave thanks to her mother for those things that really grounded her. Things to do with listening to those you don’t agree with, never raising your voice above other people, and even if you feel outraged not to express that outrage, but to work out why you’re outraged. It was about strategising and really knowing your opponent, working with them to find a quality in your ideas.

“We live in a world at the moment that is full of judgment and opinion. We sort of celebrate and encourage strong opinion and we encourage outrage as well. People are very outraged by all sorts of things, particularly with social media, where they offer their judgment and opinion very quickly … I think Ruth’s advice would be, just sit on it for a while, just take a spell or put a pin in it for a moment, because particularly with social media, you can’t take it back.”

RBG: Of Many, One had its world premiere with Sydney Theatre Company in October 2022, the production seeing Mitchell reunited with director Priscilla Jackman after their first play together, Still Point Turning: The Catherine McGregor Story, in 2018.

Jackman gave birth to her first child at the end of the rehearsal period and led rehearsals with Mitchell over Zoom from her hospital room while breastfeeding.

“She didn’t miss a beat,” Mitchell says.

“We were all going ‘oh, yes, Ruth would love this’ because Ruth never missed a day in court. Even when she had cancer treatment, she never missed her sitting.”

The season had been rescheduled because of Mitchell’s own cancer scare earlier that year, following her first breast cancer battle in 2004.

Diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time right as RBG: Of Many, One rehearsals were initially meant to begin, the news threw Mitchell into a spin and she immediately rang STC.

“They were utterly brilliant and rearranged two plays so that I could do the surgery and do all the work I needed to do, and recover from it, and then went straight into rehearsals,” the 66-year-old actor says.

“The first time I had cancer, my first thought was ‘my children’ and this time it was ‘my play’. Things have changed and the work meant so much to me. The kids would be alright, but I needed to do this for me.

“When I first had cancer (in 2004), it was a very long process. The treatment process was two years and a very difficult time. I remember waiting for an epiphany because you sort of think when you go through some big trauma, there’s going to be some epiphany, and it never happened. Life went on and had its own complications and challenges and all sorts of things.

“It wasn’t until years later, I think it was in my late 50s when you start to become a little more aware of your mortality and time might be running out, that I just had this overwhelming desire and hunger for work. I’m never tired of work. Other things in life make me tired but work never makes me tired. I am so energised by work and it fills me completely.”

The parallels between Bader Ginsburg and Mitchell do not end there, the latter also married to a Marty — love of her life cinematographer Martin McGrath — with two adult children, Finn and Seamus.

Both women were 17 years old when their mothers died, with Mitchell’s mother also Jewish and her father from upstate New York.

“This sounds arrogant, but I felt I knew her, I felt like there was part of her that was in me,” she shares.

“In terms of personal things, there were aspects that I just went ‘wow, I can really relate to the feelings of loss and grief’ and also her deep love of and spiritual connection to opera. Not that I have a huge love of opera, but . . . I understood how moved she was by an artform.

“She looks very like my grandmother. My grandmother was a rather diminutive, small Jewish woman, sharp as a tack and witty, but also a lady. She was very much a lady.

“I’ve never had a role that I quite identified with as much and felt passionately about, about what she did in her life. What she stood for just meant an enormous amount. So it’s a great privilege and a joy to stand up on the stage and say some of the things she said.”

Mitchell was born in Seoul, Korea to parents Red Mitchell and Shirley Price who met in Shanghai, China in the 1940s after World War II, where her father was a forester planting trees with UNESCO and her mother helped children through her work with the United Nations. They married soon after.

The youngest of three siblings, she lived in Jamaica and the US before arriving in Price’s homeland of Australia, settling in Camden, NSW, where Price soon became unwell and died seven years later at the age of 49.

While the rest of her family was also artistic, Mitchell became the sole actor, studying at the National Institute of Dramatic Art ahead of a career, primarily at first in the theatre where she began a long association with STC (she currently sits on the STC board) before screen roles, including more recently in Love Me, Upright, Wakefield, The Unusual Suspects and Jones Family Christmas.

“I always imagined if I could be acting in my 60s in the theatre, I’d be the happiest person ever, and I’m doing that,” she says.

“It’s really only been in the last 12 to 15 years that I’ve had much more passion to do film and television, and fortunately I’ve had those opportunities. It’s a very different way of working for me and I absolutely love it, so I think that I’m now wanting to focus more on that. Particularly after doing a six-month run of this, I think I might want to do more screen work.”

Mitchell is gearing up for the Australian tour of RBG: Of Many, One, where she is currently performing in an encore Sydney season at the Opera House, six days a week, sometimes twice a day. She’ll then head to Wollongong, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Parramatta and Perth, where Black Swan State Theatre Company will present the production from June 13 to 23.

Mitchell is honoured to reprise the role, particularly during a US election year, where there is the potential for Trump to become president again, and after the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, overturning the constitutional right to an abortion.

“So much has happened just since she died, I don’t know how she’d be feeling right now,” Mitchell says.

“A lot of people are angry that she didn’t step down, but she couldn’t predict what was going to happen. I mean, she knew that a conservative judge might take her place, but at the same time, she believed, I think, that she had so many dissents yet to write. Her mind was still so sharp and dissenting judgments were letters to the future, so that future presidents might open her dissents and enact them as law. It was worth her while staying if she could talk to the future.”