Brisbane Festival, Trish Wadley Productions and Sydney Theatre Company present

Strong is the New Pretty

By Suzie Miller
Directed by Sarah Giles

80 mins, no interval

This play premiered on 4 Sep 2026 at QPAC Playhouse, Brisbane.

This season opened on 24 Oct 2026 at Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Welcome to this play about a team made by one of the best teams working in Australian theatre today. A brilliant cast and brilliant creative team led by visionary director Sarah Giles, in service of the prolific, acclaimed and wondrous Suzie Miller and her desire to tap into the heart of the community that saw an opening on the field and went for it.

Shout out to our other teammates, Brisbane Festival and Trish Wadley Productions and all the show’s supporters sitting in the stands, especially Creative Australia who generously supported this show through the Creative Futures Fund. Sydney Theatre Company is the home for great new Australian theatrical epics and we’re so proud of this team who’ll be kicking another goal to that effect with this production. We hope you enjoy the show.

Originally commissioned by Trish Wadley Productions.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

This play is a fictional imagining by the playwright of true events. It combines fiction with references to true events and inspiration from interviews and other sources, and reflects the honestly held opinions of the playwright. The play is not endorsed by anyone who developed or played in the AFLW or the AFL, and neither the AFL nor any individual team have sponsored, approved, or been affiliated with the development of this play, nor had any artistic input into the play or production.

Jane has footy in her blood. She's played it, watched it and loved it for as long as she can remember. There's just one problem: the game she loves has never quite known what to do with her. 

Across Australia, women are getting on with it anyway. They are lawyers, teachers, coaches, players, administrators, mothers and true believers. They're appearing in court, working in the police force, wrangling schoolkids, working FIFO, teaching yoga, running local clubs and squeezing football into lives already bursting at the seams. And slowly, almost impossibly, they begin to find one another. 

Together, they set out to make women’s footy impossible to ignore: they fight for recognition, for a national platform and, eventually, maybe even for a professional league of their own. 

It's not exactly a straight run at goal. There are sceptics to win over, entrenched sexism to outmanoeuvre, money to find, bureaucracies to shift and compromises that become harder to swallow the closer they get to success. But the women keep pushing, laughing, arguing, scheming and playing. 

Spanning decades and racing towards the first bounce of the inaugural AFLW season in 2017, Strong is the New Pretty is a fictional imagining of the women who changed Aussie rules football, not by waiting for permission, but by getting on with the job. 

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Find out more about our current partners.

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Sydney Theatre Company Board of Directors

Ann Johnson (Chair)
David Craig (Deputy Chair)
Anita Belgiorno-Nettis AM
Brooke Boney
Mitchell Butel
Sarah Constable
Mark Coulter
Anne Dunn
Sam Meers AO
Heather Mitchell AM
Kate Mulvany OAM
David Paradice AO
Annette Shun Wah
Rosie Williams

See Sydney Theatre Company’s full staff list.