Critics Voice
Review of Prima Facie by playwright, Suzie Miller
By Lorraine Mortimore
We should be able to go out, get drunk, party and walk home without being afraid. Prima Facie playwright, Suzie Miller
It’s a breathtaking performance… Miller’s script is uncannily skilled…brilliantly directed…everyone who sees it will find it unforgettable….This is a different kind of offering from the National Theatre Live—a famous TV star with a visceral grasp of the spectacular nature of the emotional atrocity she’s delineating. Everyone will be taken aback by the rawness of its power.
Excerpt from The Australian on Perth’s Luna Leederville website, announcing the return season of Prima Facie
Seeing Prima Facie for the first time after missing its initial season, I agreed completely with both the above statements about the issues at stake and the success of the filmed play in powering them home. The film deserves the many records it broke and it’s heartening to learn that it’s worthy of the superlatives used to describe its force. The real-world effects the play and film have had are both surprising and heartening. (As a consequence of things that happened after the play impressed reformers in the legal profession, many judges, for example, had to watch the National Theatre version of the play before being allowed to sit on sexual assault cases. And after one British judge worked with Miller to word a direction to the jury for sexual assault cases, it’s been required to be read out at trials.) Bryoni Trezise noted when the play was staged in Sydney in 2019 (with Sheridan Harbridge in the role of Tessa), Prima Facie’s ‘an unsparing study of the Australian legal system’s treatment of sexual assault cases’. And Australia’s system is certainly not alone here. While rape ruptures the ‘body and psyche’, along with the ‘narrative that binds them together’ the legal system expects ‘coherence’, demanding that a witness ‘speak from a place of reasoned agency’. But how do you do this when you’ve been undone? Trezise nicely pinpoints what writer-turned-playwright, Suzie Miller has found, that where ‘legal avenues fall short, theatre can testify… only it does so differently, and for different ends’. In Prima Facie, we have ‘theatre-as-tribunal’—where some justice can be done.
Like many others, I continued to watch the television series, Killing Eve, despite its formulaic hunter-becomes-like the killer she’s pursuing and its being stretched out into its final series because of the fascination of its main protagonist, Villanelle, played by a young Jodie Comer, who deserved the fame she got for the role. Its exotic locations also helped, especially since they offered the chance to see this sexy, often diabolical woman morph into different kinds people, her intelligence always at play and her trauma channelled into unpredictable scenarios (involving, as is commonly noted, a vast range of accents). Comer’s incarnation of Villanelle pretty well cast a spell around the world, so it was quite a surprise to see the exotic assassin on the Graham Norton Show as a bubbly, spontaneous Liverpudlian girl. In the same vein, around the time of Comer’s Emmy Award win in 2019, when Ellen de Generes exclaimed to Comer’s co-star in that series, Sandra Oh, that she was ‘frightening, right?’, Oh excitedly replied ‘not at all!’. She couldn’t wait for Ellen to meet her. She assured her she’d be ‘blown away’ by Jodie herself and when she heard what she really sounded like.
The role of Tessa in Prima Facie would be a gift for any actress. In 2022, Stephen A. Russell wrote of ‘Miller’s primal roar of a one-woman show’. But the power of Comer’s Tessa ‘astounds’, he says, is ‘exceptional in every way’ and ‘a performance for the ages’. Comer’s thoroughly believable as she takes us through her story from the clever scholarship kid who gets into Law at Cambridge, a kind of secular ‘holy of holies’, with a little of the impostor syndrome well-known to those called ‘upwardly mobile’. She takes us through her initiation into the ‘game’ to be played by the ‘crème de la crème’, from whose ranks some will change the country but one in three will fail. ‘The game starts now’, she’s told, as she compares herself to fellow students she deems posh and entitled, and she begins to learn, to find her feet and use her fierce intelligence. There’s no truth but legal truth, you don’t trust your instincts, and the clients are innocent until proven guilty. In this game with high stakes, the law is there to protect us, and the job of the defence lawyer is not to judge or decide about a client’s guilt, it’s precisely ‘not to know’. It’s about leading witnesses for the prosecution into traps, performing, winning, and being professional, not emotional. The rewards are respect and power, which in turn lead to more cases and more money. Outstanding at the game, in command of her domain and the tools of her trade, Tessa struts and wisecracks through the first part of the film (yes, these are words we more frequently hear about men), with only the occasional doubt about her role that we see. You could say she’s a touch smug, like her attractive colleague Julian, triumphant even—until she’s not.
After flirtation, drinking and lovemaking, sick from vomiting in the bathroom and returning shaken to her bed, Julian rapes her. Going to the police and waiting exactly 782 days for her court case, the dread mounts. Russell speaks of the ‘innermost unmooring’, of Tessa, ‘a powerful woman pinned down by fear, doubting recollections seared into her brain’. She wasn’t just violated once. She’s further violated reporting the incident and throughout the whole court experience. When she worked as a criminal defence lawyer in the human rights sector in Australia, Miller noticed that many rape statements she took shared parallels:
When it was someone the victim knew… everything was fine until suddenly it wasn’t. It takes their psyche a while to catch up with the fact that they’re moving into dangerous territory. Then when it’s happening, they’re thinking, “No, no, no, this can’t be happening with this guy I’m on a date with. I was thinking about having breakfast and a relationship with him”. Your mind goes into ways to reinterpret the narrative, thinking maybe he’s making a mistake, but by that stage it’s already really violent, and then the victim blames themself for not knowing that was ahead, for thinking the perpetrator was someone they could trust.
Though not a cynical person, my own alarm bells already went off, when Tessa’s recounting their enjoyable getting-to-know-you mutual flirtation, she tells us that she could talk about everything with Julian and he actually listens. I bring this up because in the context of a violation of the woman’s whole being, it might seem a too common but harmless enough occurrence that many of us have been mistaken when we’ve thought some men were really engaged with us as full humans. Another pattern most of us experience is driven home by Miller’s text and Comer’s delivery—that each audience member look to their right and then left and know that one in any three of us have experienced physical or sexual violence. Or if not assault, near misses, or ‘lucky’ escapes from it. Just dealing with women known as ‘achievers’, with many of the trappings of successful professionals in our societies, Miller’s experience of the play’s and film’s reception has been enlightening. She says it’s true that men can be wrongly accused but she notes that the fact that false accusations happen are what the law shapes itself around, not the fact of assault itself. Miller told Ellie Harrison about an occasion where she was discussing the play with a group of lawyers, and a female defence barrister, who like Tessa, defends men accused of sexual assault, said she’d advise her own niece against taking a rape case to court. ‘She said it in front of a whole room of barristers’, saying there was no way she’d win and it would be traumatising for her ‘because [she’d] be cross-examined by someone like me’, the barrister said. Miller adds to this:
The legal process actually reduces the healing, in a way, as it isn’t catering to the pain or the trauma of the victim, and the perpetrator doesn’t ever get told that’s not the way to behave. And the message to women is, “We don’t believe you, so you shouldn’t have bothered”’.
Whatever our class, women seen to be achievers can cop it from other women as well as men. And Miller gestures to this in the early part of her play. When she returns to her family home, her mum, who earns her living as a cleaner, says things to the effect of her getting more criminals off and out on the streets. Her unemployed brother, who’d be called a ‘loser’ by many, calls her a ‘fancy fuckin’ lawyer’. But something I loved when watching the film was the fact that once Tessa’s mother’s been told about the rape, she’s completely trusting and in support of her daughter. It’s quite likely, Tessa suddenly realises, she’s known something like this herself. This quiet solidarity’s both merciful and plausible. Similarly with a young policewoman during the court case. Miller is meticulous, ‘uncannily skilled’ in structuring the play in the way a good few things are signalled early before the ‘emotional atrocity’ The Australian’s reviewer described. A second viewing reveals the twin tracks of Tessa gaining confidence as a lawyer and the fact of Julian showing interest in her, her being desired and becoming confident too in the art of flirtation. This is a young woman from the lower orders who’s at the pinnacle of her life so far. There’s a little ambiguity here as not missing a beat, she speaks of ‘peeling Jules off her’ as she must go home to prepare a big case for the next day.
And yet… I wasn’t so captured by this first part of the film. I was uneasy about Tessa’s early self-presentation, what Russell described as ‘her kinda arrogant but hard-won self-belief’, and I couldn’t believe in her ‘unshakeable belief in the legal system within which she works’, as he put it. Miller described her own background as working class, and had a nice metaphor to evoke the difficulty of someone not ‘rich and posh to work in law’: ‘Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels…that’s basically what being in a lower class does to people in the legal profession. You have to keep watching and figuring out how to behave to fit in’. She’s not wrong. It has usually been people of means, entitled and well-connected, who’ve gone into the legal profession. Her own CV is full of credentials testifying to her solidarity with the disenfranchised; working with homeless youth, at the Aboriginal Legal Service, as a Human Rights Lawyer and a Criminal Defence one. Doubtless, spending time as a child at Nhulunbuy when her dad was an engineer at the aluminium mine and having playmates at Yirrkala would have been a good part of her education. And years later back in Melbourne, her self-educated mother became a councillor in local politics and then Mayor of St Kilda. Clearly, like her character Tessa, Miller’s a very capable person. You could say she’s ‘a class traveller’, as Tim Winton has called himself, like some other artists, sports people and scholars. But her mother was no cleaner. If her father wasn’t university trained in his time, he was a professional and she was brought up with some open horizons and community mindedness. And there’s class and there’s class, an imprecise and changing term that’s been out of fashion for a while in much of the West, yet it maintains its crucial importance and force. Winton said ten years ago, while talking about his own background, that having uttered the word ‘class’ in ‘polite company’, he felt for a moment ‘as if [he’d] shat in the municipal pool’! While there’s been a relative erasure of the notion of class, with identity politics becoming the name of the game among the university-educated, an increasing proportion of the population is going into an underclass, the working poor, the vulnerable, the shut out and the disposable. Winton quoted economics writer, Ross Gittins about ‘class war’: ‘If you think the class war is over, you’re not paying enough attention… The reason the well-off come down so hard on those who use class rhetoric is that they don’t want anyone drawing attention to how the war is going. The rich are winning’. In a time of ‘socialism for billionaires’, as Yanis Varoufakis has recently put it (think of the banks being bailed out because they were ‘too big to fail’), I don’t know one working-class person who thinks the legal system is working for them or their like.
Is all of this to diminish Miller for not being sufficiently working class, or to say that her play and film (I haven’t read the novel she wrote associated with these yet) should have involved a more thorough treatment of class as it intersects with gender, and that class domination should be just as much a focus as Tessa’s sexual assault and the masculine lens of the legal system? The answer to that is a firm no. Any work, of fiction, non-fiction, docufiction or fantasy delineates its own field. And it’s usually all the more powerful if the writer/creator doesn’t feel they have to ‘say everything’, or work with one eye on ways they might be ‘called out’ by people of some different class of judges and try to cover themselves. Rather, it’s to speak of my response to a part of the play and having some doubts about the central character’s strong belief in the workings of The Law. I’ll let Winton speak for me and other ‘class travellers’ when he says that it’s hard to see class dispassionately, because within his family, ‘it’s still personal and immediate; it’s still a live issue. I find it grinding away tectonically in the lives of relatives and friends who may not want to talk about class but who are subject to its force every day’. Trust the artist to trump many theorists once again!
For Tessa, there’s no way her rape won’t remain a live issue, a ‘corrosive wound’, as she calls it. She’s been turned inside out, lost her dignity, her sense of self, her faith in the Law, the system that’s supposed to protect her, her peace of mind, safety, and her sense of joy in her sexuality. All these things are breathlessly recounted and relived, the ordeal prolonged but openly testified to when she chooses to report the violation and take Julian to court—knowing the odds are stacked against her. She’s had plenty of time to find fault with herself waiting for the court case, being a ‘fucking idiot’ for taking a shower after the forced sex, deleting evidence when Julian texts her between times to ask if she’s ok, saying he’s sorry if he upset her, and if he might take her to dinner later in the week, refusing to get what he’s done to her. (You can’t rape and pretend it was consensual, can you?’, Tessa asks rhetorically.) As she pushes ahead, despite his chorus of boy-supporters in the gallery, his ‘thoroughbred’ lawyer, who’ll also condescend with ‘concern’, the men at least know that any cloud over Julian could affect his legal career path. His concern will before too long turn into ‘How could you do this to me? Are you out of your fucking mind?’
What Prima Facie testifies to eloquently is that Tessa is not what her colleague and the system reduce her to. And we’ve the fortune to watch on as despite all she’s lost, she finds her voice, and knows it. As she walks from the rain into the courtroom, she declares ‘This is me!’, an owning of a new and altered identity that will punctuate her testimony till the end. She harks back to the braveness of the girl she was, her strength. A male colleague emailed his support (she regrets she probably didn’t answer from shame), she sees the young policewoman’s hand over her mother’s. She’s ‘a sister’. A wave of sadness comes over her, knowing she won’t win, but it’s not despair, ‘just pure sadness’, she notes. When she meets the eyes of the officer, it makes her ‘feel something good’. Her mum has exhorted her to be her ‘strong self’, not to ‘let the bastards get [her] down, even if they get away with it. Don’t let them ruin our Tessa’. If Tessa’s ‘unmoored’, she’s not a wreck. The legal system’s ‘faulty and mixed up. It feels broken’. Once again, she drives home the reality, enjoining audience members to look to their left and their right and know the reality of sexual assault as the ambient sound mounts: ‘I’m broken too. But I am still here’. She stands straight and tall. ‘And I will not be silenced’.
Once the unjust verdict’s pronounced, she doesn’t immediately know how to proceed, to make her way out of the courtroom. But she tells us in a firm voice: ‘All that I know is somewhere, sometime, somehow, something has to change’. Like Tessa refusing to be silenced, these are great fighting words. At the same time as I write this, I’m aware that I haven’t known how to do justice to the sound track. (I hope others might do this.) After Tessa closes the file on this case, ‘The Queen vs Julian Brookes’, she puts it in place on a shelf behind the desks on which she sits. The white spine with the black printed case name is illuminated. Self Esteem’s ‘I’m Fine’ kicks in and the music mounts as gradually while the set is darkened, the spines of her folders are illuminated. She sits in the shadow, but the number of cases are brought to our attention. They exist. And everyone associated with this play and film deserves our congratulations.
References
Luna Leederville. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXJQMjVjtgdMDncbcpNwxpcpdL
Ellie Harrison, ‘Prima Facie playwright Suzie Miller: ‘We should be able to go out, get drunk, party and walk home without being afraid’, Independent, Friday 29 April 2022.
Valerie Chidiac, ‘In conversation with Australia’s success story Suzie Miller’, Honi Soit, 24 Aprill, 2024. https://honisoit.com/2024/04/in-conversation-with-australias-success-story-suzie-miller/
Bryoni Trezise, ‘In Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, theatre finds a voice of reckoning on sexual assault and the law’, The Conversation, May 28, 2019. https://theconversation.com/in-suzie-millers-prima-facie-theatre-finds-a-voice-of-reckoning-on-sexual-assault-and-the-law-117588
‘Sandra Oh Praises “Killing Eve” Co-Star Jodie Comer’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHHgciWe1Ls
Stephen A. Russell, ‘National Theatre Live: Prima Facie is stunning on screen and stage’, ScreenHub, July 21, 2022. https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/national-theatre-live-prima-facie-is-stunning-jodie-comer-review-2556261/
Jane Wheatley, ‘The Aussi lawyer turned playwright making a West End debut—with a megastar lead’, Good Weekend, April 9, 2022. https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-aussie-lawyer-turned-playwright-making-a-west-end-debut-with-a-megastar-lead-20220304-p5a1q8.html
Tim Winton, ‘The C word’, The Monthly, December 2013-January 2014. https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/december/1385816400/tim-winton/c-word#mtr