The Aussie lawyer turned playwright making a West End debut – with a megastar lead

It is mid-March in England, spring is in the air and Australian lawyer turned writer Suzie Miller has arrived in London to begin rehearsals for her much-garlanded play, Prima Facie, due to open at the 800-seat Harold Pinter theatre for previews next week, ahead of an April 27 premiere. Posters depicting the face of Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer, making her stage debut in this one-woman show, are already stamped “Sold Out”.

When I call Miller to set up our interview, she’s just back from a visit to London’s central criminal court, along with the play’s director, Justin Martin, where she was due to talk to a QC about script changes that might be needed for a British audience. Or so she thought. “We rock up at the Old Bailey,” says Miller, “to find ourselves at a formal lunch with silver service and a room full of silks and judges. I’m wearing my jeans, Justin’s in a beanie, but they are so nice to us and so interested in the play, and they’ve all bought their tickets.”

Miller’s story of a barrister adept at defending men accused of sexual assault who finds herself a victim of the same crime has resonated in British legal circles even before it opens. At the heart of her drama is a challenge: how can the court system better serve victims of sexual assault, so often the losers in courtroom battles of “he said/she said”, vexed by the thorny question of consent. She knew she was prodding the sleeping lion of judicial process when she wrote it.

“I thought that as a former criminal defence lawyer, I would be criticised for questioning some of the principles of the justice system,” says the 58-year-old, who swapped the law for full-time playwriting in 2010. “I do believe in the concept of innocent until proved guilty, but at the same time I don’t think the adversarial criminal system is a forum fit for purpose when it comes to sexual assault. Cross-examination is intended to undermine the memory [of the victim] and to capitalise on the stereotypes that exist around rape culture and myths.”

“I do believe in the concept of innocent until proved guilty, but at the same time I don’t think the adversarial criminal system is a forum fit for purpose when it comes to sexual assault.”

As it was, her dramatic critique landed at just the right moment, in the wake of a global turbocharging of the #MeToo movement. Prima Facie had a triumphant run in 2019 at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre and carried all before it at the 2020 Australian Writers’ Guild awards, where it won the three top prizes. Ahead of its London premiere, theatres both on and off-Broadway as well as in Europe and Scandinavia have expressed interest in taking the show.

Hot on the heels of Prima Facie’s West End debut is a play about another legal subject, the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Also a one-woman play, RBG: Of Many, One, will premiere at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) in October, marking Miller’s debut for the company. While it’s too early to confirm anything, there are also strong hopes RBG will tour nationally and beyond. Meanwhile, two of Miller’s other plays, Dust and Caress/Ache, are being read with a view to being made into films.

Suzie Miller has written 40 plays in her 22-year writing career, a number of which have been staged internationally. But 2022, everyone agrees, is shaping up as her breakthrough year.

“She has been so uncelebrated in Australia till now,” says one of her inner coterie of besties, the actor Heather Mitchell, who will play Ginsburg in the STC production. “Yet she keeps going, always has ideas brimming.” Another friend, fellow playwright Hilary Bell, attributes Miller’s current run of success in part to her temperament. “She never seems intimidated or daunted by obstacles, and doesn’t take no for an answer.”

Jodie Comer will make her stage debut in Miller’s play Prima Facie at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre.Credit:

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I meet Miller at the studios in Southwark, just south of the Thames, where Prima Facie is in its second week of rehearsals. There’s a lot going on – the stage manager is stuck at home with COVID, the company is worried about infection spreading – but Miller, wrapped in a shaggy jacket of pink faux fur, her blonde hair worn long, is relaxed, disarmingly warm and entirely focused. As the conversation rolls on, I’m struck by her ambition and calm sense of her own worth.

Suzie Miller grew up in Melbourne’s inner-city St Kilda with a younger brother and sister; her father Robert was an engineer, her mother Elaine on home duties. “They came from humble backgrounds, one grandfather was a plumber, the other a forklift driver,” she explains. “My parents worked really hard to get ahead, scrimped and saved; I had so many jobs all through school and bought all my own clothes.”

Her cousin Jenny Cooney lived in the same street; their mothers were sisters. “We were very close,” Cooney tells me via the phone from LA, where she works as a film producer. “Suzie is the over-achiever in our family, always having 10 ideas before breakfast.”

Miller’s mother, meanwhile, was the light of her life. “She was the parent singing in the kitchen when you walked in from school. She was really smart and greatly regretted having had to leave school under pressure from her family to work. My father was not able to express emotions well, but the thing we had in common was mathematics; we loved working out maths problems together.”

Miller was nine when the family moved to the small mining town of Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory, where they lived in portable housing and her father worked at the aluminium mine.

At school, she was bullied remorselessly. “Money was tight, so my mother with her well-known frugality made me wear my gingham Catholic school dress. I’m sure I would have been a freak there anyway as I didn’t have the street smarts the others had, but the dress was a disaster.“

The only kids who accepted her were three Indigenous girls. “When school was out at 2pm, I took to going to Yirrkala Mission with them, and a whole world opened up. Laughing kids jumping in the water, green frogs, bushlands, Aboriginal stories and a whole language I’d never heard before. The deal was I could play with them if I did everyone’s maths homework, but eventually they were real friendships.”

Miller with her mother Elaine, St Kilda’s first female mayor.

The family returned to Melbourne for Miller’s high-school years, when her mother threw herself into local politics, becoming a councillor and, later, the first female mayor of St Kilda. “I was tremendously proud of her,” she says. “It was like a movie, really – she used to say, if her father Jack could see her hosting the Anzac Day Memorial at the St Kilda RSL he would never have believed it. She did it all on her wit, her smarts and her way with people.”

Miller based the character of the mother in Prima Facie on Elaine, who died in 2019, of ovarian cancer, while the play was in rehearsal. “I miss her dreadfully. She showed up for all my plays and loved everything I wrote.”

Miller talks as she writes, fluently and expressively, barely pausing for breath. At Presentation College Windsor, the former Melbourne Catholic girls’ school, talking was her special talent, along with science and art. “The careers adviser suggested hairdressing would combine these three attributes.”

Instead, she studied science at Monash University, majoring in immunology and microbiology. She rejected the offer of a PhD – “At that stage, I realised lab life was not for me; the other people, mostly male, were very quiet, always peering into microscopes” – and opted instead for law school. “I was quite opinionated and longed for rigorous discussion.”

After a gap year in London, she elected to do her law degree at the University of NSW. “I could be anonymous there; in Melbourne if people knew where I grew up and went to school, it would hold me back. People talk about Australia being classless; it absolutely is not.”

Tessa, the protagonist in Prima Facie, comes from a working-class background and has had to compete with privileged students and colleagues to get where she is. “Jodie [Comer] is also from a working-class family in [north-west England’s] Liverpool,” says Miller, “and understands how inherent it is to the story.”

Miller with Jodie Comer and Justin Martin, the respective star and director of her play’s West End debut. Credit: Helen Murray

Upon qualifying, Miller was recruited by top-tier law firm Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills) but left after 18 months to work for the Aboriginal Legal Service in inner Sydney’s Redfern. “I was not cut out for corporate law and was restless and bored.”

She moved from there to the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, a not-for-profit promoting social justice through changes in law, where she met her future husband, Robert Beech-Jones, now a NSW Supreme Court judge.

“He was a baby barrister, offered as the only one prepared to act for no fee for an Aboriginal client of mine. I thought, ‘Oh, the guy with the posh name’, but there was nothing posh about him; his grandfather had been a Welsh coalminer, his parents had immigrated young, and he’d grown up one of four boys in western Tasmania. He understood hardship, he understood how hard it was to be in the law and not have connections, not come from the ‘right families’.”

In 1995, now aged in her early 30s, Miller was working while studying at UNSW for a master’s in theatre and film on the side – “then a secret love of mine” – when she contracted viral encephalitis. “I lost the feeling down one side, had strange neurological effects and was so sick I couldn’t work for a year,” she says. It was “the most vulnerable” time in her life. “I’d been working since I was 12, and suddenly I could do nothing. I was terrified; I think my life fell apart, actually.”

When she recovered, she married Beech-Jones, resumed her master’s, and worked as a children’s lawyer at Sydney’s Marrickville Legal Centre. She was on maternity leave with their first child, Gabriel, when she was offered a job share, working half the week at Shopfront Youth Legal Centre, a resource for young people funded by her former employers, Freehills, and based in Kings Cross, Sydney’s red-light district, where she defended clients and sought compensation for victims.

Miller with and her husband Robert Beech-Jones, a NSW Supreme Court judge: “He understood how hard it was to be in the law and not have connections.”Credit: Courtesy of Suzie Miller

“These were really hard cases,” she explains, “too complicated for Legal Aid; they were homeless, on drugs, lots of young women working in the sex industry, boys too, working on the Wall [Sydney’s infamous gay prostitution strip], very broken young people. It was like working in the accident and
emergency department of the law; we were in multiple courts every day, running hearings, dealing with serious situations and awful stories.”

It was here that she dealt with the constant stream of sexual assault cases that would eventually provide material for her plays. “Sometimes the assault had happened way in the past,” she says, “but the aftermath was the same: incredible self-blame, shame, embarrassment. They would take drugs to block it out; it affected their sexuality and sense of power in the world. I would go home massively traumatised.”

What she saw made her anxious about her own youngsters, Gabriel and Sasha. “All the files I read and children I represented meant I was never comfortable letting them do sleepovers,” she says. “I had too much information about what can happen in an instant in a seemingly harmless sleepover. So they never did.”

She recalls the period clearly. “I remember Robert coming to pick me up one day, and I was dealing with someone in the middle of a psychotic breakdown, with another who was bleeding, and yet another having had an overdose but not yet high enough to call an ambulance. I remember telling Robert to ask the young man who had taken the drugs to tell him his name every two minutes and if he didn’t, to call me urgently. I remember the shock on Robert’s face at all that was happening and I realised, ‘My law life is not normal.’ I was becoming so accustomed to emergencies and serious life-and-death situations that I didn’t know any different.”

Miller was using the non-working half of her week to study playwriting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). She drew on her work at Shopfront to write her first play, Cross Sections, a depiction of the lives of people caught up in a messy 24-hour period of violence and cheap sex. The play had a sell-out run at The Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo before moving to the Sydney Opera House.

“I used to tell stories at the dinner table about my court cases and people would be horrified, but if you contextualise them in a play, then people are moved to understand.”

“Afterwards people would come up to me and say, ‘Now when I walk through the Cross, I don’t see prostitutes and drug addicts, I see someone who could be my cousin or the child of a friend.’ I used to tell stories at the dinner table about my court cases and people would be horrified, but if you contextualise them in a play, then people are moved to understand.”

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Miller continued to combine playwriting with her legal work until she was asked in 2009 to become a magistrate. At the same time, she was offered a one-year residency at the National Theatre in London. “I knew I couldn’t do both, so I decided to give up law,” she says. “I didn’t agonise over it. What I loved about the law was the thrill of standing up in the courtroom. The bench felt like an especially lonely place to me; I like being around people, I like variety and difference.”

Sheridan Harbridge in Prima Facie, which debuted in 2019 at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre.Credit: Brett Boardman

Gabriel and Sasha were 10 and 7 at the time. She recalls telling her husband:“‘I want to do this residency, and it means living in London.’ He was a QC by then, and he didn’t want to do it, he said we couldn’t afford it. I reminded him that before we got married we had a deal that at some point I could choose where we lived, other than Sydney. I said, ‘I want to know that this is an equal partnership.’ ”

Thus, they rented out their Sydney house and moved to London for a year. At the National Theatre, she was given space and support to work on a new play in draft form and provided with actors, director and designers to do so. “Writers are celebrated in London,” she says, “and I was welcomed by the theatre community.”

Her husband continued his work, flying to Sydney and back. “It was hard, mainly because I missed him. I took the kids to play-dates on the back of my bike, scooting through traffic; we didn’t have a car. When Robert was home he would be a full-time dad, and I could work and go to rehearsals.”

After their return to Sydney, she flew to the UK every few months for work. Her father was initially shocked. “He said, ‘Robert will have to iron his own shirts.’ I said, ‘Well, they’re his shirts.’ ” She greeted offers of giving “poor Robert” a casserole with the words, “Please don’t, they’re his children too.” She notes, “He was fine, he does all the cooking at home anyway.”

Her friend Hilary Bell confirms this: “Suzie doesn’t cook. When she gives her huge dinner parties, she drives to Bondi to the same fish shop, gets 14 portions of fish already marinated, then goes to the Jewish cake shop for strudel. It’s always the same and always wonderful. Her priority is entertaining and connecting people, not spending hours fussing over menus.”

Miller laughs when I report that several of her friends mentioned the legendary dinners and her no-cooking regimen. “Did they tell you I get guests to bring the salads? There are always so many dinners to pay back and I have an open-house policy: I like to have interesting people around the table talking about the world.”

They live in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west. “It’s a big, fabulous house,” says Heather Mitchell, “it’s not Home Beautiful, but it’s home. There are children and cats and dogs jumping everywhere, people staying over, and both Suzie and Robert have an extraordinary ability to read and concentrate on work in the midst of the chaos.”

“I’m always saying, ‘In a minute, in a minute.’ If you’re a mother, you’re working in the cracks of other people’s lives.”

Miller’s children picked a meme of her. “We were fostering a litter of kittens at the time and they were driving us wild, they were so active. Robert and the kids found this meme of a cat at a typewriter madly typing and saying, ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ and it was such a funny cat, typing at 100 miles an hour.

“They only revealed it to me later; they thought I would be insulted – I probably should be, as I like to think I am constantly there for my family when they need me – however, it’s true. If they come into my office and I’m writing a scene, there is something awful about being interrupted. Yet they always, always keep asking the question and no one ever waits. So I’m always saying, ‘In a minute, in a minute.’ ” She sighs: “If you’re a mother, you’re working in the cracks of other people’s lives.”

Miller’s colleagues and friends all talk about her prodigious appetite for work. “I’ve seen Suzie write on public transport, in a car, in theatre foyers,” says Heather Mitchell. “She took me to hospital for some tests recently, and she had to spend three hours in a waiting room next to a fish tank. I said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve had to wait so long,’ and she said, ‘Oh, but I’ve got so much work done. I love working in hospitals, there is something so calm about them, everyone doing a job they’re good at, and you feel safe.’ ”

Miller admits she is happiest when working: “I love the timelessness when you’re on a roll. I often go for a swim, it is monotonous, there are no other voices and I can write in my head. It’s like composing music. Then I start the first draft and don’t stop till I’ve finished.”

Does her husband read her work? “No,” she says, “if he does, he’ll tell me there’s a typo on page three. But with friends, we read each other’s work and give feedback.”

Almost all her stories have a social-justice theme. “I gave up so much income and prestige as a lawyer to do this [writing], I feel like it needs to matter,” she says. “Theatre can change lives and I want my children to see that the arts are fundamental to life.” They seem to have got the message: Gabriel, now 22, is studying art and film, while Sasha, 19, is taking a degree in game design. “Her work is on stories that are not about shooting but about communities and people.”

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During Prima Facie’s 2019 Sydney run, Griffin Theatre Company hosted a special performance for women in the law. Guests included Margaret Beazley, a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal, now the governor of NSW.

“The theatre was full of lawyers,” recalls the then artistic director Lee Lewis, who is now at the creative helm of the Queensland Theatre Company. “In the Q&A afterwards they said, ‘This isn’t a story, this is our lives.’ They talked freely about what happened to them, about harassment and assault in the legal profession. It was awful but also extraordinary: they said, ‘We can’t change it, so how can we change it for the rest of society? If not us, then who?’ It was so powerful.”

Miller vividly recalls the evening: “One defence barrister put her hand up and said, ‘I represent sexual assault perpetrators all the time; if I had a niece who’d been assaulted I’d say, don’t take it to court.’ It was astonishing how much was shared: in a safe place women will talk about their experiences, but most of those who spoke out had not done so publicly for fear of losing briefs, or silk selection, or bench appointments.”

The success of Prima Facie has certainly opened doors. Its London director Justin Martin tells me that when he got the script from Miller, he sent it out to several producers. “At first nobody was reading it, they said no one was interested in one-woman shows. Then it opened in Sydney, everyone went mental for it and [British producer] James Bierman felt it would be a good fit. Now there’s a lot of interest; this play will rattle the bars.“

There’s media interest, too: among those to interview Miller has been the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, who conducted the famous car-crash encounter with Prince Andrew about his friendship with the late US financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

As well as preparing for that West End premiere, Miller is working on her play about US jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with Priscilla Jackman directing the inaugural production at the STC. “In the play we meet three of the US presidents Ginsburg served alongside: Clinton, Obama and Trump,” says Jackman. “I feel it is a study of power and leadership through the central figure of this tiny Jewish woman of extreme wisdom in juxtaposition with these three men.”

Miller has immersed herself in everything she could get her hands on about Ginsburg’s life: “She went from nothing to magnificence and changed the world. Her husband Marty was vital to her career: he really believed in equality, cooked all the meals. He put her forward, men need to do that.”

Heather Mitchell will play the late American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the play’s premiere at the Sydney Theatre Company in October.Credit:

After almost two hours, she fetches us some water and returns looking at her phone. “It seems I’ve had an offer to make a film series – there have been a few other companies getting in touch and I’m starting to have meetings. It’s a very robust industry here, theatre in Britain is like sport in Australia.” She looks wistful: “I want to live here.”

Women playwrights have had a better time in Europe than in Australia, she argues, where until fairly recently directors and the playwrights they program have often tended to be male. “I had one show which was rejected by a small theatre in Australia, then accepted in Edinburgh and won an award in New York.” That play, Reasonable Doubt, took the 2008 New York Fringe excellence award for outstanding playwriting. “Things have got better [in Australia] now with more female directors.”

Among spin-offs from the success of Prima Facie have been a contract to write two books for Pan Macmillan – one the story of the play, the other a psychological literary thriller – and growing film and television interest, for which Miller and her cousin Jenny Cooney have formed a production company. Cooney is already hopeful of making a film of Miller’s play Dust.

“She’s always looking at my stuff and saying, ‘That could be a movie, that could be a TV series,’ ” says Miller. “Screen has opened up for playwrights, TV especially has caught up with the nuance of theatre.”

From Cooney’s perspective, this is good news for her cousin. “Theatre is her first love, but if you want to bring about change, the bigger the audience, the better,” she says. “A lot of people are wanting a piece of her and I have no doubt that one day she will be giving an Oscar speech – and a Tony and an Emmy.”

Not that Miller’s ambition stops there. She wants to build an auditorium in the garage space behind the Newtown family home. “A pop-up Inner-West End,” she explains, “a small 60-seat theatre to bring people together with cheap seats and great new writing. The architects have already designed it and there are people ready to help with funding. I want it to be something we can share as a family with the community. Live theatre is dynamic, responsive and transformative: when we’re all in there together, anything can happen.”

I was told many stories of Miller’s love for assembly, for connecting ideas and people, and her capacity for rescuing her friends. Good Weekend books writer Nicole Abadee says Miller is the busiest person she knows. “But if you need her, she’ll drop everything. She doesn’t ask how she can help, she acts. And she always has ideas for solutions and projects.”

Talented, loyal, godmother to 14 children, apparently universally loved: surely Miller has other faults – apart from untidiness and not cooking? “Good luck with finding them,” laughs Abadee, a friend since law school. “All I would say is I worry about her habit of working into the small hours, which isn’t a good thing as you get older. And she doesn’t like to say no to anything; I think she needs the confidence to realise how sought-after she is and not take on everything she’s offered.”

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The evening after our interview, Miller and I go for dinner at The Wolseley, one of the loveliest, grandest dining rooms in London and a favourite of thespians, journalists and artists, a bit “look at me”, a bit “look who’s over there”. I thought it would be fun to take her there – and it is, because we have a happy time talking about families and horses – I have one, Miller wants one. But tonight, service-wise, the old W has dropped the ball. The young waiter forgets our orders, then brings Miller a glass of vinegary wine, and then takes ages to replace it. The litany of errors continues until, at the end of the meal, he confides that he only started here two days ago, is sorry for his mistakes and has taken the service charge off the bill. We are disarmed and add the tip anyway.

Outside on Piccadilly, we chat to the friendly doorman. Miller asks him how to get to the Thames. “Oh dear,” he says, “are things that bad?” We have a laugh, the evening ends happily and I send her off through Green Park in the direction of the river and her hotel.

“I’m just going to do a bit of work before bed,” she says. Of course she is.

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