By Helen Musa

Australian lawyer-turned-playwright Suzie Miller has been the toast of the theatrical town for some time now.

She is celebrated for works such as Prima Facie and her Ruth Bader Ginsburg play, RBG: Of Many, One.

Now she has turned her attention to the unlikely subject of Australian Rules football, in particular the Australian Women’s Football League, in a new play, Strong Is The New Pretty.

She’s also about to release her new book, Inter Alia, in which Jessica Parks, an eminent Crown Court judge, is forced to reckon with her professional life and her role as wife, mother, friend and feminist when a devastating crisis hits home.

So new is Strong Is The New Pretty that when I catch up with Miller by phone to Brisbane, she’s preparing for the first preview that night.

The show fields eight star players – Lucy Bell, Amy Hack, Amy Ingram, Edyll, Amber McMahon, Tara Morice, Nyasha Ogden and Contessa Treffone, all under the watchful eye of director Sarah Giles.

It premieres as part of the Brisbane Festival before moving to Canberra.

From afar, it sounds like a radical change of direction for Miller, whose chart-topping plays so far, with even a film version of Prima Facie in the mix, have focused on legal issues, albeit from their human side.

In 2010, a report into the state of Australian rules football recommended the creation of a national women’s league, but it wasn’t until 2017 that the AFLW was born.

Miller’s forebears in Melbourne were all welded-on Swans fans who were horrified when the team moved to Sydney in 1982, with only Suzie and her mother standing on the sidelines, indifferent.

But somehow she fronted up to an AFLW game in 2017 and found herself drawn in by watching all the young girls watching what was happening on the field. It was true drama.

“It was a metaphor of what happens, about how women get things done, about how they imagined this into being,” Miller tells me.

“I found it a great metaphor for how we can change the world.

“In my play, I like to think we can celebrate them for their great Aussie female grit, for the way women get things done, how they work their way through the cracks, how they blow it up into something miraculous.”

And that’s even if progress is slow and hard at the beginning.

“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.”

And it wasn’t just the women Miller found herself watching.

“I was watching the men who believe in the women watching a dream come true, which was great… and if, as Australians, we want to believe in a fair go, we have to renovate that concept for the 21st century.”

After that visit in 2017, Miller started interviewing women left, right and centre, gathering material for her play. But she is adamant that this is not verbatim theatre.

“There’s plenty of drama in Strong Is The New Pretty,” she says. “I made up a story based on what they told me and wove it together.”

Within the play are characters from different levels of society. There are believers in equal opportunity and there are those who just want to play football. Another character wants to coach professional football. Miller looks at where people have missed out and shows characters pushing themselves out from the sidelines.

Miller declares herself a natural optimist who really does believe in a fair go for all, even if she admits there are “a million obstacles”.

“I like to believe in the better side of humanity.”

Strong Is The New Pretty, The Playhouse, September 24-26. Suzie Miller will talk about her new book, Inter Alia, for ANU Meet the Author, Kambri Cinema, October 8.

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