Her mother was from Bohemia. Sue began her career in 1975 as an administrator at the Albany Empire, Deptford. She moved to the Soho Polytechnic and decided to take advantage of the encouraging environment and started writing a play.
She spent a year in Canada and then returned and with inspiration from Kate Crutchley, Nancy Diuguid and members of Gay Sweatshop she wrote Bohemian Rhapsody. She showed the play to Noël Greig who advised her to pass it on to Kate Crutchley, and it was subsequently performed at the Oval House in 1980. The play received excellent reviews which encouraged Sue Frumin to write a the two-person play Rabbit in a Trap which was also directed by Kate Crutchley in the Oval House Upstairs Theatre. This was also well-received and moved to the King's Head and other venues.
Sue Frumin was then involved with the formation of a comedy team, The Red Bucket. This name was chosen as a reference to the fringe company Red Ladder which specialised in what Sue Frumin called 'camp little numbers' such as an adaptation of Peter Pan called The Great Wendy. After the The Red Bucket team disbanded Sue Frumin went to Rose Bruford College to train as an actor. However, the experience undermined her confidence rather than boosting it.
She wrote and performed her one-woman play The Housetrample, taking it on request for three or four years around Britain and to the Netherlands and the USA. In 1985 she was asked to write for Gay Sweatshop and so she provided the all-woman show Raising the Wreck. She became writer in residence with Live Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne. She produced a play based on local corruption that the audiences liked but that received mostly poor newspaper reviews.
Returning to London she formed her own company, Shameful Practice. The name was taken from an article in the Hackney Gazette that reported a local rabbi as saying that there were no such things as lesbian Jews, but if there were they should stop 'this shameful practice'. Their first production was Home, Sweet Home, (1987), which was first performed at the Duke of Wellington Pub, Balls Pond Road, London. It then transferred to the Broadway Studio (Catford Broadway), and the Oval House, Kennington.
The group's next play The Beggar's Opry was difficult to produce and did not work well. There was the additional problem that a large grant was expected from Greater London Arts but it collapsed. After this she only wrote a one-woman show about herself and her twin sister. She took up a demanding teaching job and put playwriting aside.
