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