Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia stormed the West End, won lead actor Rosamund Pike an Olivier, and will transfer to Broadway in November. The global hit playwright discusses the magic of Sydney, tackling knotty social issues on stage, and failing to recognise Jude Law.
When I meet Suzie Miller on the Sydney Opera House forecourt, I immediately apologise for the weather: what should be a dazzling view of the harbour in mid-afternoon sun is instead overcast, drizzly and cold. She breezily waves it off – she’s just returned from London, so everything feels warm.
It is the first of many signs of the glass-half-full optimism that fuels the Australian playwright – and her extraordinary two-decade career, which spans a gobsmacking 40 plays, including Prima Facie, the one-woman legal drama that won Olivier and Tony awards for Miller and actor Jodie Comer, and has been adapted for the screen starring Cynthia Erivo. Her most recent play, Inter Alia, stormed the West End, won lead actor Rosamund Pike an Olivier, and will transfer to Broadway in November.
And it all started here. Scanning the harbour, Miller recalls her first encounter with this view as a 22-year-old. It was 1987 and she had just moved to Sydney from Melbourne, jettisoning a prospective career in science to study law. “I was on my bike, and I didn’t even know my way around yet, but I found my way here and I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ The water, the sun, that blue sky – and the Opera House.”
Miller grew up in a working-class family in St Kilda, attending a Catholic school that was “vocational rather than intellectual”. She credits this education with forging her strong sense of social justice – “There’s something about the Catholics, they do that well,” she says with a wry chuckle. But after leaving high school, she remembers feeling like she didn’t have the right educational or social “credentials”. “In Melbourne, it’s a bit like, ‘What school did you go to? Who are your family?’ So, there was just something magical about arriving in Sydney. It felt like: I can actually dream what I want to be.”
Eighteen years later, with a career in human rights and criminal law under her belt, Miller returned to the Opera House with her debut play, Cross Sections. Set over 24 hours in Kings Cross, the play drew on her work representing sex workers, addicts and homeless youth, and was fuelled by her frustration with society’s ignorance and indifference towards these vulnerable communities. When it made its debut in 2004, “Lots of people said, ‘I’ll never drive through the Cross in the same way,’” she recalls.
It was Miller’s first taste of theatre’s power to change hearts and minds en masse – and she was hooked. In the years since, she has returned time and again to plays to unpick knotty aspects of the social and justice systems, including the rehabilitation of underage offenders in 2009’s Transparency, and the effect of the prison system on young men in 2023’s Jailbaby.
Nothing Miller has written, however, has had quite the impact of Prima Facie. Premiering in 2019 after #MeToo, the play’s clarion criticism of sexual assault law – based on Miller’s frontline observations – touched a nerve with audiences, going on to a national tour and two additional productions within Australia, and many more overseas. It resonated within the legal profession, too. At an early performance held for female lawyers and jurists, a top QC admitted she would never advise her own female family members to pursue a sexual assault allegation in court. When the play opened in London, it spurred a group of barristers and judges to form an organisation advocating for revision of UK sexual assault legislation.
Inter Alia, which examines sexual assault law from the perspective of a female judge whose son has been accused of rape, had a different kind of impact. It was inspired by conversations with men who confessed they were scared to closely examine some of their sexual encounters as young men. After performances, Miller says, fathers would come up to her in the foyer “and say, ‘I’m going home to walk my son around the block and have a proper conversation about things I’ve been too scared to talk about.’
“That’s huge, just the fact that a man can go, ‘Actually, I’m not doing enough.’ Because why are women doing all the hard work?”
Miller is a warm and focused conversationalist; she talks quickly, brimming with enthusiasm and curiosity. As we walk around the harbour foreshore – dodging tourists, seagulls and intermittent squalls – I start to understand why she gravitated early in her career towards working in places such as the Aboriginal Legal Service and Shopfront Youth Legal Centre. She seems indefatigable and I sense she can talk to anyone. When I tell her we first met 15 years ago, she is effusive and apologetic, grabbing my arm and examining my face while explaining that a case of encephalitis in her 30s has made it harder to recognise people. “It’s one of the biggest liabilities in my career right now. I mean, sometimes someone will go, ‘Hi, how are you?’, and I just pretend I know them.”
She recounts an incident where she was sitting next to Jude Law at the theatre and, while chatting during the interval, praised a play reading she had watched recently. “He said, ‘Yeah I was in it’ – well, it was a solo reading, so I was like, ‘Sorry, are you Jude Law?’” she chortles.
We’re wending our way to Sydney Theatre Company’s wharf HQ, where Miller’s latest play, Strong Is The New Pretty, about the birth of the AFLW, will open in October after its Brisbane premiere. Down the road at the Roslyn Packer theatre, the original 2019 production of Prima Facie will return for a victory lap in June.
“With Strong Is The New Pretty, I wanted to talk about how women manage differently; how they dream things into existence,” she says. “It’s not a hero’s journey. Men always have the hierarchy and the person who’s the hero, and that’s not how women operate; they have a different way of sharing power and actually empowering people.”
Strong Is The New Pretty continues Miller’s seven-year streak through Australian theatre, which has included her bioplay RBG: Of Many, One about US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which premiered in 2022, sold out an encore national tour in 2024, transferred to Sydney Opera House in 2025 and this year toured to Adelaide and Perth; and Jailbaby and Anna K, which both received encore seasons.
Australian theatre hasn’t always been so welcoming, however. Even after her auspicious debut, Miller found the local industry impervious. “All the artistic directors were men and they were choosing young [people like them] to write and produce and direct. Someone actually said to me, ‘Oh, women can’t write plays,’” she says, incredulous. “I was told, ‘You need to have a man as your main protagonist, otherwise no one will go.’ I said, ‘You know what? Fifty-two per cent of theatregoers are women.’ And actually, once they are taught that actually they can see themselves there, they’re probably going to crave seeing more.”
In 2009, when she was offered a residency at the National Theatre, she decided to jettison both Australia and her legal career, and moved to London with her husband (a barrister at the time, now a judge) and two small children. She’d lived there briefly before – after graduating from her law degree she worked in a cafe in bohemian Camden Town while moonlighting as an actor and living in an old terrace with Boy George’s back-up dancers. “George would come and stay because he’d get kicked out of his home,” she says. “It was such a bizarre scenario when I think about it.”
Then financial necessity brought her back to Sydney and a position at a prestigious law firm – but the year in London was when she first knew she wanted to write. “I realised I wanted a really strong intellectual life as well as an artistic life,” she says.
Now, for the first time, she is enjoying being “the mistress of my own time and of my own work”. She is developing the third play in what she now considers a trilogy about sexual assault and the law, this time exploring the jury’s perspective.
“I’ve always got more work than I can handle, there’s no doubt about that,” she says good-naturedly. “But then I had that as a lawyer as well, and people’s lives were at risk. So I keep going.”
It starts raining and Miller stops to admire the view: “It’s magnificent, isn’t it? Look at those little ferries – same as ever, just chugging along.”
Prima Facie opens at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne on 20 May, then at the Roslyn Packer theatre in Sydney on 3 June. Strong Is The New Pretty will premiere at the Brisbane festival from 1 September.
