Suzie Miller is the rare Australian playwright who can open a main stage national touring show without tent-pole casting. Her new play, Strong is the New Pretty, has been highly anticipated since it was announced, coming off the back of the globetrotting success of her sexual assault play Prima Facie and followup hits RBG: Of Many, One , about pioneering US supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Inter Alia , starring Rosamund Pike as a judge grappling with sexual assault allegations against her own son.
With Strong is the New Pretty, Miller swaps the courtroom for the locker rooms and boardrooms of the AFL, to tell the story of the women’s league. Its premiere at Brisbane festival, hot on the heels of sexual assault allegations involving Sydney Swans players, feels particularly freighted. The sexism and misogyny depicted in the play is very much front of mind.
Related: Suzie Miller: ‘Someone actually said to me, ‘Oh, women can’t write plays’’
Strong is the New Pretty is billed as the “untold story” of the AFLW, but anyone who has read sports journalist Samantha Lane’s 2018 book Roar will be familiar with the plot points and key figures.
Miller lightly fictionalises her account. Sam Mostyn, the AFL’s first female commissioner, and a key advocate and coordinator in the fight to establish the AFLW, becomes Alison Newtown (Lucy Bell), a lawyer who takes the lessons gleaned from fighting sexism in the courtroom and applies them within the AFL. Jan Cooper , the AFL commission’s first female football development manager, becomes Jane Hooper (Tara Morice). Bec Goddard, the federal police officer turned Adelaide Crows coach, becomes Bev Heath (Amber McMahon). And Lane becomes Susannah Knowles, a plucky young sports reporter who becomes an early champion of the AFLW.
These are the main characters, with the rest of the all-female cast of eight playing fictionalised members of the Adelaide Crows, as well as doubling as various side characters and a Greek chorus of male buffoons. Miller’s brisk 80-minute play, split into five chapters, opens with the main characters’ experiences of sexism on their path to the AFL, and whisks us through the formation of the AFLW, including the pivotal exhibition match in 2015 – the first televised women’s AFL game, which proved its commercial viability.
The now legendary first competition match in 2017, between Collingwood and Carlton, whizzes past, with the momentum instead building to the grand final between the Brisbane Lions and Adelaide Crows.
Most of the key incidents in the play – including the most outlandish and the most shocking – are drawn from reality. And yet there’s a fairytale feel to this version of the story, in which a posse of virtuous women overcome adversity and an obstacle course of cartoonishly sexist and bogan men to triumph in their righteous cause. Every setback is overcome, every dragon is slain – from the boardroom naysayers to the supermarket checkout attendant who body shames one player. It makes for many fist pump moments and a lot of easy comedy, though the sense of inevitability somewhat undercuts the dramatic stakes.
Miller’s theses are clear and spelled out more explicitly and frequently than they need to be: women have a uniquely collaborative and subversive model of change-making within hostile systems, and the long-term project of gender equity is a relay in which the baton is passed from one generation to the next.
Director Sarah Giles meets this brief with a pacy, crowd-pleasing production in which the entire female cast is almost always on stage together, and the tone is heightened and satirical, incorporating live sound by the performers (breathing into mics and using body percussion), dance breaks and physical comedy. McMahon, Amy Ingram, Amy Hack and Contessa Treffone are particularly good on the comedic front, with Bell and Morice providing the bulk of emotional ballast.
Clemence Williams’ soundtrack of clapped and vocalised beats (interlaced with danceable tracks including Pump Up the Jam and Black Betty) and Kelley Abbey’s choreography provide a sense of dynamism that forestalls some of the play’s “talkiness”. Footy play is evoked in slow motion choreographed sequences, with the performers manipulating a pole-mounted Sherrin through the air. Nobody is trying to pretend they have ball skills – which is probably for the best. The focus is on the human stories.
At barely 80 minutes on opening night, the play could perhaps afford to take a few more breaths to explore these stories, and the material’s more complex and emotional terrain. These moments, when they come, resonate as powerfully as the cathartically comedic ones: a conversation in which two team members (Nyasha Ogden and Edyll Ismail, both excellent) swap notes on dealing with racism, sexism and public shaming; a scene in which another player (Ingram) is body shamed in the supermarket.
The play’s triumphant endnote glosses over a sense of what the next leg of the race is; what change still needs to happen when it comes to addressing pay equity, sexism and racism in the sport. But Strong is the New Pretty feels like a – well deserved and satisfying – victory lap.
• Strong is the New Pretty is on at Brisbane festival until 19 September, then Canberra 24 September–3 October, Geelong 8-11 October and Sydney 22 October-5 December
With Strong is the New Pretty, Miller swaps the courtroom for the locker rooms and boardrooms of the AFL, to tell the story of the women’s league. Its premiere at Brisbane festival, hot on the heels of sexual assault allegations involving Sydney Swans players, feels particularly freighted. The sexism and misogyny depicted in the play is very much front of mind.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Dee Jefferson. Published 5 Sept 2026, 02:14 am.
