SUDS Reviews

SYdney Theatre Company: RBG: OF MANY, ONE 

By Carmen Rolfe

Suzie Miller’s one-woman show ‘RBG: Of Many One’ stars Heather Mitchell as the ‘notorious’ Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court and a staunch advocate for women’s equality every minute of her life until her death in 2020. First written and performed in 2022, ‘RBG: Of Many One’ has returned to Sydney’s stage with Heather Mitchell reprising her highly acclaimed role at the Sydney Opera House’s Drama Theatre. Walking up the steps of this iconic venue, one must wonder what it means for this play, centred around this American icon of justice, to be given the spotlight for the Australian audience of 2025.

The play begins with Heather Mitchell alone on a bare stage, begging for the phone to ring. From this first moment, Mitchell breaks down the image of RBG as a tough and untouchable lawyer, as her performance is surprisingly comedic, light-hearted and earnest. The first part of the play is centred around her waiting in anticipation of President Bill Clinton’s decision to anoint her as a Supreme Court Judge, and is intercut with flashbacks of her life up to this pivotal moment. The brisk pacing and operatic score gave the first hour of the play the impression of something like a ‘superwoman origin story’, charging through the key moments of her life, from her feelings of great injustice from being denied a Bat-Mitzvah, to understanding the strength of a voice at the opera, to entering Harvard Law school and being made to justify her right to study as a woman in a male-dominated institution and struggling to find work at a law firm. This collection of flashbacks all build up to the tearfully victorious moment where she stands, self-consciously underdressed in the Oval Office, as Bill Clinton shakes her hand and tells her she will be a Supreme Court Judge. 

It’s clear from the first hour of the play that the director’s focus was to capture the spirit that RBG represents through these emotional moments that convey to the audience her true sense of devotion and dedication to achieving gender equality in a space that didn’t accommodate her. Whilst the heartfelt tone of the first hour at times felt overly sentimental, with the relentless operatic score occasionally veering towards cartoonish and the raining of law papers across the stage like confetti that wasn’t worth the efforts of the stage-hands to pick up in the black-out, the sense of hope and victory left amongst the audience after the first hour was undeniable. 

It is this effective creation of this spirit of hope that allowed for the second half of the play to be so effective and ultimately seal ‘RBG’s’ message to the audience of 2025. It is here where Heather Mitchell hits her stride as the much older, wittier and charming RBG, wrapped in lace collars and gloves. Though Mitchell’s RBG definitely doesn’t lose the humour of the first hour, the comedy takes on a darker tone, with Mitchell’s cunning imitations of Bill Clinton being replaced by simultaneously hilarious and chilling imitations of Donald Trump. It was during the first of these impressions that a shift was felt in the audience. The audience’s laughter was no longer attached to the words Suzie Miller had written back in 2022 but rather was born from the audience of 2025 who held the ominous foresight of Trump’s re-election and the horrors that RBG would never live to see. It felt like a dark secret shared between the audience and Heather Mitchell, who broke the fourth wall through her slow, emphatic delivery of lines concerning Roe-v-Wade, Trump's election, and the dangers of an individual’s influence on presidential decision-making, demonstrating a meta acknowledgement of the irony of these lines being written in 2022 before anyone knew what was to come. The audience’s tears during RBG’s death were reflective of a greater grief. As she spoke of her belief in America’s first female president and her final wish for her Supreme Court seat not to be filled until the 2020 election, the audience shared in grief over the death of hope and progress. With the constitutional crisis in America and the divisive upcoming federal election here in Australia, it seems as if we are years behind the future RBG had hoped for, as we are still fighting for the fundamental equality she was working to establish at the beginning of the play. 

What Suzie Miller’s ‘RBG’ can serve us on the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre stage in 2025 is a heartfelt reminder of hope. Heather Mitchell’s loveable and clever portrayal of RBG as she defies the odds and works her way to enact real change shows the audience that change can be possible and that the fight for equality is not over.

RBG: OF MANY, ONE is Playing at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until the 17th of May

SYdney Theatre Company: Bloom

By Cormac Herron

When I walked into the Wednesday night showing of Dean Bryant’s Bloom, I didn’t expect it to be as well timed, thought out, and considerate as it was. As soon as I walked into the Roslyn Packer theatre, I immediately noticed a change in the air.

Bloom covers subjects like the nearness of death, the problems with the healthcare system, love as a senior (and junior), and the ever-looming quality of life vs budget. The young deadbeat, Finn (Slone Sudiro), begins lodging at the local aged care centre for free in exchange for helping out as a carer, but what he doesn’t expect is that he ends up building a bond with his fellow lodgers and fights to uphold their dignity with Ruby (Vidya Makan) and Gloria (Christina O’Neill) against Mrs MacIntyre (Christie Whelan Browne).

Now this is the part where I feel I have to make it clear that I am the most evil kind of theatre-goer turned cynic. My friends can attest to this chronic cynicism, especially after the dreaded incident where I debated for a very lengthy dinner, myself against seven others, about the cultural relevance of Hamilton to an Australian audience. The worst part is that this wasn’t the first time we’d had this debate. I love to take a piece of theatre, chew it up and spit it out, find all the things good and bad, the things I liked and that I didn’t, and then give my plethora of perhaps too critical thoughts and observations on the show.

Like any other night, I thought I would again fall into my usual habits, however, this night, I was at the mercy of the skilled director Dean Bryant, and I didn’t even realise until the last third of the performance that I had been completely duped by the writing and arrangement of Katie Weston and Tom Gleisner and that a few of my gripes about Bloom were actually nifty musical and story-based choices that I had been tricked by until they decided to reveal this.

I would first like to express my surprise at the variation in age in the cast, ranging from early twenties to early eighties, but the older members of the cast more than certainly did not act their age, in fact, they felt just as, if not more youthful than the youngest, giving me a keen reminder of the humanity of these people. I was equally surprised by the vocal strength of the elder cast members, as they truly had some gorgeous and powerful voices among them.

I also couldn’t help but notice that despite the fact that this is supposed to be a musical, it felt more like a realism piece with musical numbers in it. It did not adopt the melodrama of musical theatre but it certainly took the witticisms and pace. I felt like I was watching things that had played out in my own memories, and this was heavily to its advantage, as it helped convey the importance of the issues in healthcare that it was discussing without diminishing or satirising the wrong subjects. Characters mostly felt like they had been given a healthy dose of their archetype, like the old man who doesn’t talk about his feelings (Doug, played by John Waters), the actor (Roland, played by John O’May), or the strong-willed and intelligent young woman (Ruby). There were, of course, exceptions to this, like Betty (Maria Mercedes), the old kleptomaniac, who was propped up by the repetitive jokes of her being a thief and her son coming to visit, who never did.

Repetition seemed to be a running theme of this piece, and while you could argue that this was the point, as it often is in theatre, I would venture to say that the repetition of these running jokes was a crutch. I started to tire of hearing ‘swear jar’ every time someone swore, and while this became relevant later, that in and of itself felt like a crutch to save the plot, just like Betty did, but I relent. What I will say though, is that the non-repetitive humour, the numerous one-liners, did not lose their effect on me. Who else was the queen of this but Evelyn Krape as Rose. Neither the actor nor character disappointed, and I was in awe of Krape’s energised performance. My joy and satisfaction in Rose’s casting is a main reason why I was so happy with the casting on the whole, I felt like everyone was well cast for their character and understood them.

It’s here that I feel I should stop myself from dissecting this production any further, because I know that I could go on for hours on topics like the structure of the pit, the accents that the actors sing in, or the parallels I kept on noticing between this and other theatre that I’ve consumed.

At its core, Bloom is a valuable reminder to the importance of our healthcare workers. Equally importantly though, it also reminds us that we should care about our parents and grandparents, not just for them, as Gleisner writes. The accuracy and care taken regarding these issues was deeply warming considering their seriousness and I am deeply interested to see what he comes up with next. I can’t ignore the timeliness of this play too, with the ASMOF currently on strike for the betterment of their welfare and pay. Bloom has come at exactly the right time. It’s not the melodramatic and grandiose Jesus Christ: Superstar, but it doesn’t need to be.

So should you watch it? Yes. Yes, I think you should.

Bloom is playing at The Roslyn Packer Theatre until the 11th May 2025.