The role of RBG was written for Heather Mitchell. It’s easy to understand why

Inside the Sydney Opera House on a recent afternoon, it was 1993 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was waiting for a phone call. That call, confirming her nomination to the US Supreme Court, changed her life and the lives of many. It wasn’t possible to watch Suzie Miller’s one-woman play, RBG: Of Many, One, starring Heather Mitchell as Ginsburg and 25 major figures in her life story, without locating the now-mythic judge in my own emotional landscape.

Ginsburg’s childhood home in Depression-era Brooklyn was five miles from mine 50 years later. She was appointed to the Supreme Court the year of my bat mitzvah, when I stepped towards adulthood. She began her legal career in New York’s southern district, where I was admitted as an attorney in my 20s while working at the type of firm from which she would’ve been rejected at that age by virtue of our gender and religion. In other words, from the moment I was conscious of America, the law and my place in it, Ginsburg was there – the guideless guide, leading by example, pointing past the parameters of the possible.

But every hero carries idealisations. I remember visiting the Supreme Court as a child, how the seemingly infinite stairs led to a building of Biblical proportions. And how the courtroom inside felt, somehow, smaller than the exterior had led me to believe. Besides appeal benches, who judges the judges? Litigants, lawyers, politicians and the public are just some populating that crowded court of opinion. In the final assessment, none are likely to show less mercy than the judge judging herself.

Speak with judges and personality patterns emerge: low emotional reactivity, high diligence. Methodical, meticulous. They’re like pilots in this regard and for good reason: life – its material and emotional preconditions – is in their hands.

The robed persona conceals the person. Many people might be unaware that judges are crushed between the cosmic scale of their unrelenting workload and the finitude of time. Or that in rare moments when they’re not working, they’re probably worrying over it. That work – its volume and confidentiality, the courage required to disagree with one’s colleagues – builds walls around them.

Many made peace with solitude long ago, having embarked on the path that deposited them at their current altitude because they were comforted in some capacity during childhood by books. That’s often the source of their faith in the world-altering power of words. Of Many, One, which opens in Melbourne this month, explores these aspects of the profession and one of its most iconic individual expressions.

David Fleischer’s set has the effective minimalism of Ginsburg’s judgments. A black expanse of stage book-ended by white columns evokes the grandeur of the court, the opera and the pearly gates. Gazing into that darkness is like peering into the past: part memory, part dream. It’s there that the work takes us, Miller adroitly braiding the factual record with imaginative passages about what remains unknown.

We meet Ginsburg’s strict but beloved mother, who shaped her work ethic and love for opera while instructing her to develop what Buddhists refer to as “lion mind” (“[Don’t] lose time on useless emotions like anger, resentment, remorse, envy … they don’t get you where you want to be”), though the home was “a house of grief” following the death of Ruth’s sister.

Ruth falls in love with Marty Ginsburg, who personified male feminism before such language existed. We see the ritual humiliations of being one of nine women in a Harvard Law School class of 500 and, likely, the only one with an infant. How it required her to be better than everyone and yet still not good enough.

She nurses Marty through cancer, studying all night to ensure they both pass their classes, functioning on two hours’ sleep. Graduating first in her class, she finds that her “triple strike” – Jewish, female, mother – meant no prestigious, white-shoe law firm would hire her. When she eventually secures a court clerk position, the rest is history.

In the role written for her, Mitchell morphs into each Ginsburg variation as well as Marty, Vladimir Nabokov, conservative justice and unlikely mate Antonin Scalia, and presidents Clinton through Trump with such uncanny precision that the work feels like an ensemble performance.

“I feel such an intimacy with her, such deep respect, such a great love for her. I feel like I must have met her. It’s a strange feeling.”

Heather Mitchell

“I was sitting with Suzie having a cup of tea,” Mitchell, wearing a T-shirt with “See you next Tuesday” across the front, explains over Zoom. “It was during COVID, we were on her veranda talking about RBG. I didn’t know as much as Suzie but had been reading quite a bit and I said something like, ‘What a remarkable woman and a great loss to the world. I’d so love to play her.’ And Suzie said, ‘I’ll write it.’”

Miller, also known for the acclaimed legal drama Prima Facie, which starred Sheridan Harbridge in Australia and Jodie Comer on Broadway, finished a draft of RBG: Of Many, One in about three months.

“It was a beautiful, organic process,” says Mitchell. “It was fraught with challenges but none have been insurmountable. I developed breast cancer for the second time just before we started so [Sydney Theatre Company] swapped two plays around so we could postpone it. [Director] Priscilla Jackman was pregnant, and the date change meant her baby was due the week we opened. So … with a baby on her breast, [she was] giving me notes via Zoom in the rehearsal room. It was extraordinary. I think we felt Ruth was championing us.

“From all the research I’ve done, those I’ve spoken to who knew her, I just feel such an intimacy with her, such deep respect, such a great love for her. I feel like I must have met her. It’s a strange feeling.”

Not so strange, this affinity. Ginsburg and Mitchell both lost mothers after periods of prolonged illness before they turned 20. Both were young mothers of two, working in merciless professions. Both have a beloved Marty (Mitchell is married to cinematographer Martin McGrath). Both survived cancer. And both became energised by work that would exhaust others. When I met Mitchell backstage immediately following her 90-minute, no-interval performance, she exuded the calm alertness of someone who’d just finished a yoga class.

Despite the tightrope of a one-person show and the weight of expectation following the lauded 2022 run, Mitchell says she feels no pressure. “[This time] feels very different,” she says. Partly that’s due to reconfigured staging, but it’s also because of Ginsburg’s depth of character. “[The first time] I was trying to represent her as she might’ve sounded, this time I’m trying to find more of her humour, her mischievousness, a little more of her inner joy.”

Miller’s training in law and physics shows in her work, which has the boldness of the advocate who turned down the magistracy for art and the acumen of the scientist who sees institutional failures warping the unified field of collective life. Through the alchemy of her script and Mitchell’s performance, key cases – those tinder-dry materials of legal education and practice – are elaborated with glittering concision, made as compelling as the real-life operas they were. In this way, the play, like the law itself, is comprised of stories within stories.

Deft handling of character, context, causation and closure lies at the heart of all enduring narratives including that one we call “justice”. As jury research demonstrates, information generates empathy by shifting perspectives. This was Ginsburg’s approach as public interest litigator and judge. In addition to deploying cool rationality, she spoke truth to power in the original sense: using lived experience of the law’s failures to evoke compassion as a bridge to a more perfect union.

“She was still in the time when women struggled more in the workplace,” says Mitchell. “But I’m in my 60s and she was in her 60s when she moved onto the Supreme Court. This is something that’s really struck me. The older I get, I feel like my life’s making much more sense to me. What I’m leading to is that she used all her personal life in her judicial life … There’s something very rewarding about having the opportunity to use experiences that you’ve accepted and don’t see as tragic or anything to work through – to be able to use them joyfully and creatively is a great gift.”

The play gives an immediate sense of Ginsburg during her 27 years on the court: her reverence for detail, loathing for the chaotic illogic of hypocrisy and capacity for lightness. By nature, though, a presentative play can only gesture towards her signature inwardness and private pain. Those, too, were qualities that drove her into the work like a bone-screw.

“Ruth was a stoic,” Mitchell says. “She had great ferocity, fervent belief and worked tirelessly but she also, I believe, had such an acceptance. That’s why even when she felt outraged, she didn’t express it … You must feel things otherwise you wouldn’t be driven to do anything. So emotion is important, but know what to do with it.

“She’s an incredible strategist. She looked at all the potential possibilities of what could happen in the future in different areas of the law and in terms of society and gender inequalities.”

Ginsburg wrote for legacy, particularly in her late period, which earned her the handle of the Notorious RBG. But the profession’s codes, and her temperament, meant she wasn’t an open book. So her biographers, like any judge, must balance multiple truths on a basis of agreed facts and unknowns, pinning their best hopes on approximation.

One of the most compelling scenes in the play is an imagined lunch Ginsburg, 83, might’ve had with Barack Obama. While still able to appoint her successor, he tries discussing the wisdom of retirement. Ginsburg refuses to please the president; she respects him, but that is beside the point. The point is not playing party politics; her integrity, sense of duty, faith in the separation of powers. And a hint of something messier.

Ginsburg’s work opened doors for herself and others. Her usual practice was to work all day and through the night. It was normal for her to remain at the court so long that Marty would bring her home for meals. She worked through two bouts of cancer without missing a sitting day. And returned to work as usual the day after Marty’s death after 56 years of marriage. Work’s anaesthetising properties are hidden when it serves a public good.

Ginsburg’s refusal to retire conflicted with her respect for logic and her knowledge of the law’s limitations in a nation where judges are appointed by elected officials and not all votes count equally. Its consequences included a Trump-appointed successor, resulting in the current court’s curtailment of women’s health rights. In its contradictions, however, it was a very human refusal. The final scenes, in which she is dying weeks before the end of Trump’s (first?) presidency, are as classically tragic as the operas she loved.

Where does grief go? The feeling of being less than? The anger, resentment, remorse, envy? Not into work as clean as Ginsburg’s. It goes into a compulsive drive to do that work. But at what cost? And how does it impact the final accounting, by others and with oneself?

Though the Australian legal system is itself an import, there may be some who take issue with centring an American legal hero. But this play will always resonate with audiences here because of the recognisable human complexity at the heart of its heroine and the extraordinary uses she made of it.

“The richness of her story, I would defy anyone to not find something they could connect with,” Mitchell says.

RBG: Of Many, One is at Arts Centre Melbourne, April 25-May 12. http://artscentremelbourne.com.au

Sarah Krasnostein is the author of The Trauma Cleaner (2017), The Believer (2021/22), Not Waving, Drowning (2022) and On Peter Carey (2023). She holds a PhD in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria.