Suzie Miller was told ‘women can’t really write plays’. She’s now won awards in London and New York

May 31, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

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,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald