Heather Mitchell plays Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 'I was even brushing my teeth as Ruth would'
Heather Mitchell plays Ruth Bader Ginsburg: ‘I was even brushing my teeth as Ruth would’
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Heather Mitchell preparing to appear in RBG: Of Many, One, a role that was written for her and will be performed at Sydney Theatre Company’s Walsh Bay theatre. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
The Australian actor is portraying ‘the notorious RBG’ in a one-woman play. She talks about stepping into the shoes of a judicial lion
Fri 28 Oct 2022 15.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 28 Oct 2022 15.01 EDT
The spirit of the late US supreme court justice and feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg has entered Heather Mitchell. The actor has developed the bent spine of Ginsburg’s latter years, the clenching of her bite and speech, the tighter hand and finger movements that result from ageing tissues. Sometimes, after leaving rehearsals at Sydney Theatre Company, Mitchell unconsciously finds herself moving like the diminutive octogenarian who championed gender equality and reproductive rights, and who died of pancreatic cancer in 2020.“I was brushing my teeth last night and thinking, ‘What’s wrong with the toothbrush?” laughs Mitchell, 64, during a break in the four-week rehearsal period for the new play RBG: Of Many, One. “And then I realised, ‘Oh, I’m doing it as Ruth would’.”
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pictured during her confirmation as her husband, Martin, looks on, in 1993. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters
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A fixture of many Sydney Theatre Company productions for 40 years, Mitchell has no fears standing by herself on stage, having played transgender military speechwriter and cricket commentator Catherine McGregor in one-person play Still Point Turning in 2018.
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When Bader Ginsburg died, Mitchell “felt scared, a little bereft” because RBG’s dissenting judgments “were so important and so strong. She truly believed her dissents were there for future generations of women, that there will be female presidents who will read those dissents and change the nation”. Of particular contemporary prescience is Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of the reliance on the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling to underpin abortion rights. She argued that the ruling’s basis in privacy between a woman and her doctor, rather than on equal protection grounds, was susceptible to attack. This year, the precedent was overruled and abortion rights have since been scaled back across the US. “What made me feel scared in the current climate is the danger that her voice will get lost,” says Mitchell.
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Bader Ginsburg is relevant internationally as a “courageous” figure, forging a judicial career at a time when women were largely being denied advancement. While Australia now has its first female-majority high court, Miller recalls back when she was waitressing to help her through law school, she waited on the table of the first woman appointed to the high court, Mary Gaudron, and how inspiring it was when Gaudron told her: “Well, I hope I see your name on the high court.” Icons matter. Miller says she read widely and deeply about RBG, including all of her cases, which “give you a sense of the magnitude of her intellect and her capacity for thinking clearly”. Miller says Bader Ginsburg’s dissenting judgments will provide wisdom for the decades and centuries ahead.
Bader Ginsburg was “absolutely right” in speaking out against the Roe v Wade judgment and submissions, says Miller, even though it did not make her popular at the time. She “was prescient about a lot of things”, with the exception of being “misguided” about Trump’s chances of winning the 2016 election and her own refusal to resign from the supreme court to allow Obama to replace her with a younger progressive justice.
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RBG: Of Many, One previews at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 theatre from 29 October, the season running from 4 November to 17 December.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/oct/29/heather-mitchell-plays-ruth-bader-ginsburg-i-was-even-brushing-my-teeth-as-ruth-would