By Thomas McMahon
With the kind of good fortune that sometimes follows a burnt-out traveler, an old friend of mine was in London over Easter last year when I was passing through. He had two of the cheapest tickets to the opening night of a play for the following evening. After climbing some stairs, we found ourselves in the standing section at the very back of the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End. The play we were there to see was Prima Facie, a detail I learned from the poster above the door as we walked in. The lead actress I recognised as Jodie Comer, the charming and psychopathic assassin Villanelle from the hit BBC spy-thriller Killing Eve.
Prima Facie is a one-woman show that tells the story of Tessa Ensler, a young defence barrister who takes us through the inner workings of the court system; first as a lawyer, but then as the victim in a sexual assault case.
The play first premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney in 2019. For this production the play was nominated for and won awards in three categories of the Australian Writers Guild awards. For the West End production, it was nominated in five categories of the Olivier Awards, winning best actress and best new play, and was sold out weeks in advance for a six-week production at the Melbourne Theatre Company this year. In April, the show premiered on Broadway where it challenged Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton for the top spot in sales that week. In May, a movie adaptation starring Cynthia Erivo was announced. In June, Jodie Comer won a TONY award for the Broadway production. Part of the play’s positive reception can also be attributed to the fortuitous timing of its release at the back end of the #Metoo movement, a cultural climate better attuned to the themes of the play. But outside of these factors, Miller’s script stands tall on its own.
The play erupts to life with a display of Tessa’s prowess as a barrister as she circles around a witness on the stand, poised with her coup de grace line of questioning that casts doubt on her witness’s narrative and wins her the case. The audience is thrust into the thrills of the blood sport of advocacy and we quickly learn that Tessa, the tenacious lawyer on a long winning streak of cases, sits near the top of this food chain. In the first half of the play, Comer draws in the audience with her displays of confidence and charm. Her mesmerising ability to assume multiple identities, well-known to fans of Killing Eve (if you know you know), is masterfully showcased as she breathes life into the diverse personas of the play. The script, written by Australian playwright and ex-lawyer Suzie Miller, is demanding in what it asks of the solo actress, who is forced to incorporate the parts of the witness and the barrister, the passenger and the cab driver, and challengingly, the rapist and the victim.
The opening scenes take us on Tessa’s journey from her upbringing in a working-class family, to her first days at law school, up to jostling with ‘thoroughbred’ silks and judges in a courtroom. In each setting, we are encouraged to recognise in different ways that Tessa has had to struggle to be where she is. On her first day in law school, Tessa’s insecure thoughts intrude.
‘Society has said that law school means you’re important, everyone seems to believe it, except me; I’m still pretending.’
The professor who leads her orientation tells the new students they might be the ‘crème de la crème’ in a top law school, but that doesn’t mean they are good enough for the law. The students are told not all of them will practise the law, only a few will be barristers, and there’s a once-in-a-decade chance they’ll be a judge. After being told one in three of them will not finish the degree, the new students turn to the people sitting on either side of them.
I turn to the boy. Thomas. Of course he’s called Thomas.
He glances at me. He’s already dismissed me.
Fuck you.
In the second half of the play, Tessa’s grappling with the statistical chance of her finishing law school is sharply juxtaposed against a much darker statistic as she becomes one of the three women globally who is a victim of sexual or physical violence. While the law conferred power on Tessa as a barrister, who came from a working-class background and worked hard to pursue social justice, the play shows her passing through the legal system as an almost powerless victim: ‘my life is in the hands of the cops, the DPP, the court system, I have no control’.
Miller’s script is revealing of the traumatic and isolating process of reporting a sexual assault. Tessa is forced to detail the assault to a belligerent male police officer who, upon finding out that she is a defence barrister, flatly remarks ‘now you need us though, don’t you?’. She goes to the hospital alone to take a forensic medical exam as evidence, moves chambers to evade her assailant at work, sits alone in a witness waiting room and, when she takes the stand to give evidence, realises the judge and all the lawyers present – even the stenographer – are men.
When Tessa gives evidence in the final scenes of the play, we hear a polemic of our legal system come to the fore. Each line of the script reveals a fresh sense of the frustration felt by the ex-lawyer playwright. It is in these scenes that, perhaps especially for current and aspiring legal professionals, critical questions are raised about how sexual assault cases are handled in the courts and justice system.
‘A woman’s experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth’ Tessa tells the courtroom in the final scene. Miller points to the generations of decisions about legal truths made by men during periods of time in which women did not have the right to vote or own property.
Tessa’s cross examination demonstrates that the process of interrogation plays not only the role of being an investigation of evidence. It is also an opportunity to confuse and distort a witnesses’ testimony and to affirm rape myths or prejudices in the minds of the jury. In place of interrogating and challenging the efficacy and the assumptions of the law, ‘we persist in interrogating victims’.
Miller directs us towards considering the how of the sexual assault trial that contributes to persistent issues of low conviction rates, high attrition rates, and the re-traumatisation of the victim. Even Tessa, the fierce barrister who has stood on the other side of the witness stand many times, suffers immensely throughout the process of the trial.
Noting her years of experience as a lawyer in Australia, Miller states in the script foreword that while she firmly believes ‘innocent until proven guilty is the bedrock of human rights, it always felt that its application in sexual assault cases served to undermine rather than to uphold any real fairness.’
Prima Facie should engage members of the legal community in Australia with the complexities and challenges surrounding sexual assault cases. It encourages them to be proactive agents of change, equipped with a deeper understanding and empathy for survivors, dedicated to fighting for a more just legal system.
Prima Facie reminds us that the theatre is an avenue of social change. When the play was first produced in 2019, Miller sold a night exclusively to women. Among the women invited to this show were politicians from state and federal parliaments, judges, silks, and solicitors. Several all-boys schools, as well as members of the Law Reform Commission, were also invited to attend shows during the production. The compassion evident in the post-performance discussions that followed some of these shows, Miller has said, offers a ‘beacon of hope’ to future generations. Perhaps to emphasise this, a live recording of the play is now mandatory viewing for the High Court bench in Northern Ireland. Prima Facie isn’t just broadcasting a cultural message, it is sending one to people who have the power to affect change. This play is a stark reminder that the laws surrounding sexual assault have failed women and society. But the law is organic, and when it fails to provide justice, as Tessa tells us in the final line of the play, ‘something has to change’.
Purely Dicta 