Prima Facie

Barrister Tessa (Jodie Comer) in wig, gown, jabot, and tailored suit is alone on stage -  a stylised barrister’s chambers, mahogany furniture, green shade desk lamps – but dominated on all sides by towering shelves of files – hundreds and hundreds of white ring binder files of past cases, files of current cases – some won, some lost.  (Design by Miriam Buether.)  For Tessa very few cases were lost.  Winning is called ‘coming first’; losing is ‘coming second’.  With ferocious energy, she boasts how she comes first, how she’s a thoroughbred, bursting out of the box when she cross-examines a witness, undermining, sowing doubt, finding the holes in the witness’s evidence.  And she coolly describes the calculated, theatrical tricks she uses to accomplish that. 

Tessa believes in the ‘first cab off the rank’ principle, but we gather that a lot of her work is sexual assault and rape cases – and then that the ‘witness’ is often the claimant – that is, the victim.  Tessa is so cocky, so triumphant, so totally unfeeling of the witnesses she demolishes that she is just that bit disturbing, even chilling.  But of course, Tessa is played by Jodie Comer, whom we all loved in Killing Eve although in that television series she was a remorseless assassin.  So here we go with it.  Tessa’s introduction to herself – via Jodie Comer - is a trap for the audience and it’s a very good set-up for where this play will go.

Tessa will first go on to tell of how she climbed up out of a working-class background, how she was determined and shone at law school, got herself into good chambers.  How she is being head-hunted to even better chambers.  How she begins a sort of an alcohol fuelled thing with barrister colleague Julian - including a drunken bonk on his office couch…

This is a play with a non-linear structure, jumping back and forward in time, past and present mixed, each switch signalled by a flash of light and a just perceptible verbal signal.  But there is a mid-point and then the playing with time stops as disaster strikes.  Then there is a complete change of tone and of the mode of storytelling, and what is happening on stage changes radically when Tessa is sick, vomiting, in pain in an evening dress in the street and totally drenched with rain…  The law and the designed-by-men system that Tessa has worked so well now descends on her with the most crushing weight and a denial of who she is.  All those files going up and up take on an extra resonance when Tessa’s case is, after all, just another one.

In the rave reviews this show has received in London, the emphasis has been on Jodie Comer’s performance.  She is on stage alone for ninety minutes - and she is close to overwhelming.  Her delivery is Intense, fast, very fast, with fleeting smiles, grim looks, visible pain, tears, fighting tears, angry, almost but not quite overcome by emotion.  So, it makes sense that the dominant impression people take away is on the dazzling performance (c.f. The Picture of Dorian Grey) rather than on the play itself.  Comer delivers the play, brings it to life, finding in Suzie Miller’s text everything there is to find and more.  But Miller, herself a lawyer, has a very serious agenda beyond a character study, beyond mere drama. 

The burden of the play is the patriarchal law in all its aspects vis à vis sexual assault.  What better, richer irony could there be than to have this smart-arse lawyer as the storyteller?  ‘Just wait until it happens to you, sweetheart.’  Prima Facie is a searing, powerful stage drama, but it also has an explicit educational purpose. 

The website gives some UK figures: 33% of rape victims withdraw their complaint; the time between the offence and a court hearing is close to three years; after that, only 1.3% of rapes are prosecuted.  These figures are horrifying, but they are, surprisingly, a revelation to some folks.  On our way out I overhear a middle-aged lady say to her friend, ‘One in three women is the victim of sexual assault – that’s shocking.’  And she was shocked.

So, ultimately, Prima Facie  has a didactic, even agit-prop function.  Given the play’s impeccable purpose, I must say, however, that the text could do with an edit: hammering points home, it becomes repetitious.  There are so many words, that director Justin Martin resorts to Comer several times rearranging the desks on stage and climbing on them – which doesn’t make a lot of sense beyond breaking up something that could, in the first half, be totally static.

There is no doubt that Prima Facie is a powerful piece, driven and delivered by a very powerful performance.  But it is a play, at least in the UK, in collaboration with and for the Schools Consent Program to bring about awareness and discussion.  Apart from schoolkids, will the people who need to see it, see it?  Or is it preaching to the choir?

Michael Brindley

Buy the play script at Book Nook.

Photographer: Helen Murray

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