Theatre / RGB: Of Many, One, written by Suzie Miller, directed by Priscilla Jackman. At The Canberra Theatre, April 12. Reviewed by SIMONE PENKETHMAN. 

Sydney Theatre Company’s RGB: Of Many, One, is an hour and 40 minutes of riveting theatre. 

Heather Mitchell’s performance as the legendary US lawyer and judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg is poetry in motion. Time seems to simultaneously fly and stand still. 

Bader Ginsburg lived from 1933 to 2020. A brilliant strategist, she was behind many advances in gender equality and women’s rights.

Australian playwright Suzie Miller focuses on the period from 1993, when Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the US Supreme Court by Bill Clinton, to her death in 2020. Episodes from her earlier life are remembered and re-lived throughout the show. 

Although performed without an interval, the play is written in three acts with costume changes marking the transitions.

In part one, she is anxious and underdressed as she meets President Clinton to discuss her possible appointment. Her patience is strained when he watches a three-hour basketball match before confirming her position as the second woman and the only Jewish female Supreme Court judge.

“Only a man could think basketball is more important than the future of the Supreme Court.”

In part two, wearing a sparkling suit and her mother’s brooch she meets another president: Obama. 

She is in remission from cancer and Obama tries to persuade her to retire so that he can appoint a younger judge while he still holds a majority in the senate. 

There is laugh-out-loud comedy in Mitchell’s mimicry of a parade of powerful men including presidents from Carter to Trump. 

But this story is a tragedy. Bader Ginsberg’s fatal flaw is denial of her own mortality and an unshakable belief that President Obama will be succeeded by “the first female President of the United States”.

In part three she is frail and dressed in gym wear, having discovered the benefits of working out at her “advanced age”.

She reflects on the humiliation of having to apologise to Donald Trump for speaking out against him during his presidential campaign. Then, true to her complex character, she takes comfort that her words did not affect the democratic outcome.

In her final hours, with only 46 days until the 2020 election, she dictates: “My final wish is that I am not replaced in my role on the Supreme Court of the United States of America until such a time as the election has been won.” 

The rest is history. It echoes loudly as the stage lights dim.