With plays such as RBG and Inter Alia to her credit, Sydney’s Suzie Miller is one of the most successful and influential contemporary playwrights in the world. Her signature work, Prima Facie – which returns to Sydney at the Roslyn Packer Theatre on June 3 – has been staged all over the world and is regarded as one of the most significant new plays of the 21st century.
Fitz: Suzie, go with me on this.
[A tall, dark, handsome stranger with a certain suave air about him takes his seat in Sydney’s ICC last Sunday evening, and before the show starts, engages in polite conversation with the blonde woman and her husband sitting next to him. Suddenly, the stranger realises he is talking to the famous Suzie Miller, world-famous playwright! At this point, he changes gear and proceeds to suck up shamelessly and plead for an interview.]
SM: [Laughing.] You weren’t that bad, and it was nice to chat!
Fitz: What struck me about your career as soon as I started reading about it on the way home is that despite your amazing success, you really didn’t get stuck into writing plays until you’d been round the block four or five times as a deeply experienced criminal lawyer, developing the knowledge and experience needed to start serious writing at the age of 40 or so?
SM: Yes, people might take heart from a later start because I’d had so many other careers before I started as a playwright. It’s absolutely the place that I need to be, and I love to be, and it’s absolutely my passion. But I often think that there must be a lot of people in the midst of having small children, or caught up with mortgages, who think they can’t leave their job. But there really is new life after 40, and even after 50. I guess what I did is a bit unprecedented, but I really do feel like the previous careers helped this career.
Fitz: So let’s say you’re a famous playwright, and I’m a biographer, writing your bio on my thumbnail. I think it goes like this: Raised in a working-class Catholic family in Melbourne, you were the first in your family for generations to receive a tertiary education, studying science before you switched to law, and so brained ’em in the law you got the big city law firm gig before being so bored out of said brain you joined Redfern’s Aboriginal Legal Service. That experience of defending people in criminal trials, and seeing the underprivileged side of life up close in places like Kings Cross, leads you to writing your first play, called Cross Sections, which is quickly put on stage at … the Sydney Opera House!
SM: Yes, that first one poured out of me. We had 12 people in the cast and one of the older actors was marvelling that we had 100 scenes in the first act. I asked “is that unusual?” Apparently so, but it was so much fun, I thought, I’ll just keep doing this. This is really where my heart is, so I’ll just do both until I can afford to do just play-writing.
Fitz: Your particularity as a playwright is that you are less an entertainer and more an activist – with a lot to say about what’s wrong with the legal process, particularly when it comes to women, and you use your plays to bring widespread change that your legal work alone couldn’t do?
SM: Yes. Though I was admitted as both a barrister and a solicitor, I practised only as a solicitor so that I didn’t have to abide by the “cab rank” rule and do sexual assault cases, defending rapists. I was just not interested in doing that because I don’t believe the system works. But what I had noticed in the law was the power of story-telling to change things.
Fitz: Go on …
SM: When making your submission to the judge before sentencing, you needed more than just “my client had a difficult childhood”. Much more effective is to tell the story, and make the point. “At the age of three, my client was sexually assaulted and found in an abandoned car. Where was the state? He returns to his parents, both of whom are drug users. Where was the state? His behaviour at school was out of control. Where was the state offering help? And now the state wants to intervene with a heavy sentence, which will cost a fortune and do no good to anyone? Instead of that, Your Honour, I’ve lined him up for detox and rehab and he will have the benefit of social workers when he gets out. It’s your decision, Your Honour …?”
Fitz: It would be a heartless judge that bangs the gavel down on the guilty one’s head when presented like that?
SM: Precisely. But telling that story in court can help a few people. Telling it in a play can entirely change attitudes. Once my first play went on, I started getting notes from people saying “I’ll never drive through the Cross again and just see prostitutes and drug addicts. I will see people. People that could be my children, or my children’s friends.”
Fitz: Despite the success of that play, you were still not bowled over with opportunities?
SM: Yes, and not just me. I remember looking around, seeing very few contemporary women playwrights. I asked a director why was that so, and he said, “because women can’t really write plays”.
Fitz: And you were on your way!
SM: Yes, I did a little experiment before I left. I wrote a little two-hand play (Reasonable Doubt) that I sent to every theatre in Australia; one to an Edinburgh producer who lined it up for his slate for the Edinburgh Fringe, and one to a producer in New York at the Cherry Lane Theatre. And really bizarrely, it went on in Edinburgh and got great reviews. It went on in New York, and I won this massive award for excellence in playwriting. But no one in Australia ever followed me up, ever, to this day. And yet now Universal have just bought that play to make a TV series, so it wasn’t me, it was the situation I was in.
Fitz: Taxi! Take this fine playwright to London, where she is finally going to get a bit of (sniff) RESPECT!
SM: Yes, going to London and succeeding there really gave me confidence.
Fitz: Which leads to nothing less than global success. If I may gush in unseemly fashion for a moment, I absolutely loved RBG. I thought your portrayal of the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a masterpiece. But the play that has truly taken the world by storm is Prima Facie, which returns to Sydney at the Roslyn Packer Theatre this Wednesday evening for a limited season. For this one, you once again draw on your experience in the legal field, and your thrust is that the law dealing with women who have been sexually assaulted is framed by men for men to protect men.
SM: Yes, it’s quite astonishing. It comes from centuries and centuries of men deciding the law, but not just men: often straight, white and relatively aristocratic men, with the law being framed to protect themselves from ever being accused or ever being convicted of something that they don’t believe they’ve done. The original framing of the law was that by committing a rape, you were not offending against the victim, but against the man that owned her. The whole thing came from property law that if you rape a woman, you’re destroying another man’s property.
Fitz: And so you frame Prima Facie to be centred on a brilliant woman criminal defence barrister who specialises in defending accused male rapists and is very successful at it. She believes the adversarial legal system – relying on incontrovertible evidence, procedure and reasonable doubt – is the best way to achieve justice. That is, until she is herself raped and suddenly is confronted by the way the law is actually so framed as to allow most rapists to walk.
SM: Yes, I put 15 years’ worth of dealing with sexual assault cases into that play. Every night after court, I’d take notes. They were always young women under 25, and they always had the same story. They’d been raped and the starting point of the law was not to believe them. By the end of the day, about 2 per cent of those cases that ever went to court found someone guilty. And these were serious sexual assaults. I’m not kidding – really serious ones.
Fitz: A large part of your play is to expose “rape myths”. Can you give us examples?
SM: These are myths along the lines of “a genuine victim will always physically fight back”, “a victim will immediately report the assault to police”, “a victim’s behaviour after the assault should follow a predictable pattern”, “if there are inconsistencies in memory that means the allegation is false”, that “prior sexual behaviour, flirtation or drinking implies consent” and so on.
Fitz: Jaysus, I must say this is sounding familiar from recent cases! “And can I suggest to you, Madam, that because we have clearly established that you were wearing a miniskirt on the night, and only a thong for underwear, you were really looking for sex all along? You led him down that path! And you’d been drinking! Can you tell His Honour, why did you drink so much?”
SM: Exactly. So many women go to court seeking justice only to have experiences in court that not only re-traumatises them, but is sometimes even more traumatic than the original experiences because they’re accused of being liars, they have their reputations destroyed, they are publicly hounded and harassed by experts over days. The play came from my experience of dealing with thousands of rape victims who were in complete despair after what happened to them. They remembered who did it to them, and they remember what happened. They just don’t remember all the peripheral details because they’re in so much trauma. And men fail to understand what it is like.
Fitz: You do focus a lot on the gender difference in regards to dealing with rape.
SM: Yes, like this concept of “freezing” that is often used against women. The only way that the men who framed the law can understand defending themselves against some sort of threat is to run or fight. But for women being raped, they sometimes react differently and they freeze. And the problem with the law, framed by men, is that so often there was this absolute distrust of women being able to tell their truth and be believed. It just wasn’t possible. It was like, unless the alleged victim fitted being a 16-year-old girl dragged behind a bush in a school uniform and raped, then “rape” didn’t enter into the equation. Men didn’t think that it was incumbent on them to actually make sure that someone was consenting, so they could ignore anyone saying “no”, thinking it’s part of a game. At least that’s what they’d say later – and they’d be believed.
Fitz: So you put this on the stage in London, and the world changed. It’s been translated and performed in 50 countries, and is still going strong. I love the story of the English law lord who called you the morning after the premiere on the West End.
SM: Yes, when she called, I was thinking, “Am I actually going to have to pull the play? How am I going to tell the producer?” But it was completely the opposite. She wanted permission to reproduce some of the script in a circular sent out to judges. And now, in Northern Ireland, a film of the play is mandatory viewing for newly appointed High Court judges.
Fitz: In the meantime, in talking to you, I can’t help but remark that you’re neither stunned by your success or particularly vainglorious about it. If I were you, everything anyone would say would remind me of the time “I WON ‘THE OLIVIER’ AND ‘THE TONY’, did I tell you, the two most prestigious drama awards in the world!”
SM: [Laughing.] Well, I’m still quite stunned by the fact that I won the Olivier. I was clapping away, waiting for the name of either Aaron Sorkin or Peter Morgan or one of the guys and they said my name, and I went, “Oh, f—!” because I just didn’t imagine I would have a victory. It was astonishing, I did not see that coming, and my husband, poor old Robert, had his alarm set to watch it live and of course he slept through the alarm and didn’t see it and I called him. He goes, “Oh no, I’ve missed it. How was it?” I told him, and he said, “Oh my God, I’m the husband that missed it. I can’t believe it.”
Fitz: And even then, you had not even properly broken into stride. You can call me the wannabe President of the Suzie Miller Fan Club if you must – I’d be honoured – but I reckon you will go far. [The interviewer closes the conversation with yet more cloying protestations of his deepest admiration. The famous playwright nods, slightly amused by his charming clumsiness.]
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