At a crossroad, Suzie Miller took the risky path, away from a safe job

The Interview: Playwright Suzie Miller stood at a crossroad and chose the risky pathBBy Brett Worthington Link copiedShareShare articleThere's an alternate world in which Australia's most decorated contemporary playwright Suzie Miller goes by another title: Your Honour. In 2009, having risen through the legal profession, Miller found herself at a crossroads. One option was a lucrative magistrates job, a position that would have offered financial security for life. Her other option was the financially fraught world of the theatre. Not for the first time, she changed tack. Years earlier, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster put Miller the science student on a different path. She studied law and became a human rights lawyer, representing women and Australia's most vulnerable, in part inspired by experiences as a child in the Northern Territory and the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. As a lawyer and mother, she kept studying, this time playwriting. After turning down that magistrate's job, she has been in a rush ever since. A prolific writer, her plays were watched by more than a million people last year. Her most recent hit, the legal drama Inter Alia, is currently winning awards in London's West End, and will head to Broadway later this year. You've written more than 40 plays but it's your recent work — Prima Facie, which is touring in Melbourne and Sydney, and Inter Alia — that's been incredibly successful globally. Is there a moment when you realised telling a story focused on the inner dialogue of women of the law was resonating with audiences? My first play had a lot of inner dialogue, ironically, but it was just luck, because I liked writing that. In Australia, someone once said to me when I was writing a play and I had a female protagonist: "You better make the main character a man, otherwise it's not going to go on." And they were right, because it didn't go on, but then it went on when it had a male protagonist. And the irony is that I was so desperate for productions, I sort of went, OK, that's the recipe for Australia. Once I got to a certain point with craft, I wanted to write what I was really passionate about. I developed this idea that, as a feminist woman, there's so many kinds of dialogues going on in your head as you're traipsing through the world. Even when you're in conversation, you're having another conversation. You're always juggling. And I think the dominant paradigm as a man is you're not second guessing yourself, or worrying that someone's looking at you strangely, or thinking you might have smiled too much at some man that's taking it as come on. So in effect, [men are] much more present in the moment. Whereas women, there's so much going on in every moment, and I think that in my work women really see themselves. Miller, right, with James Bierman and Jodie Comer. They picked up awards for best actress and best new play for Prima Facie at the 2023 Olivier Awards. (Reuters: May James) I want to go back to a defining period in your life, 2008 and 2009. You write a play and send it everywhere in Australia, to Edinburgh and to New York. What did that experience teach you? I looked around at all the theatre companies and thought, they don't have any female playwrights in any of their seasons. And when I spoke to artistic directors about that, one even said to me, "Oh, it's basically because women can't seem to write plays", which was astonishing. And I also thought, if I'm going to leave my law practice to be a writer, I have to know it's going to work. I used to be a scientist, so I thought I'd do a little experiment. I wrote a two-hander set in a hotel room so it was very easy to put on, very cheap, and I sent it to every theatre in Australia; I sent it to one producer that had a slate at the Edinburgh Festival, and I sent it to the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. The Cherry Lane came back, they did it, it won this massive award. In Scotland, it got really great reviews, and it was really the beginning of my career in the UK, because as a consequence of that, I got a whole bunch of commissions. Because of that experiment, if I had got no pick-up anywhere, I wouldn't have left the law. But in Australia, no one ever got back to me, ever. So I thought, well, it's not me, it's Australia. If I want to be a playwright, I have to focus my career elsewhere, because I don't have the time on my side to wait for Australia to catch up. How frustrating was it to get international recognition before you get recognised at home? It's very, very frustrating. It wasn't until I had Prima Facie on the West End and won the Olivier that they went, "Oh, you're really one of us". And I thought, well, yeah, but no thanks to all the theatre companies for not picking up stuff. And ironically when I did Prima Facie in Australia, it was because it was a female artistic director who could see what was possible with the play and put it on. But I'm very happy here [in London] and I feel like my sensibility

At a crossroad, Suzie Miller took the risky path, away from a safe job

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