Review: Prima Facie at the Harold Pinter Theatre (Cinema Stream)
“One in three women. Look to your left. Look to your right.”
Accurate statistics on rape and sexual assault are notoriously difficult to come by, and different organisations offer slightly different figures on the number of women and men who will experience it during their lifetimes. The exact numbers, though, aren’t what matter. What matters is how undeniably pervasive sexual violence is, and how often perpetrators get away with it. And Prima Facie, by Australian playwright and defence lawyer Suzie Miller, is a play about exactly this.
Starring Jodie Comer (of Killing Eve fame, amongst others), Prima Facie ran at the Harold Pinter theatre from 15th April to 18th June this year, and tickets were harder to come by than gold dust. I’d resigned myself to missing this one until a nationwide cinema streaming was announced. So last night, along with thousands of people across the country, I headed to my local cinema to see what the hype behind this one-woman, one-act play was all about.
What’s it about?
(Please note: review will contain plot spoilers.)
Tessa is a brilliant young barrister whose brains and determination brought her from working-class origins to Cambridge and then to a glittering career, defending men accused of sexual assault. Tessa views the law as a game and herself as a winner. Her job is to cast just enough doubt on each case to ensure that her clients walk free. “There is no real truth, only legal truth,” she tells us.
But when a colleague rapes Tessa, she finds herself on the other side of the witness box stand and questioning everything she thought she knew about truth, the law, and her role within it.
Any content notes?
This is one of the most challenging plays I’ve ever seen. It deals with sexual assault and rape in excruciating detail. While the rape is not exactly “shown”, Tessa gives a brutal blow-by-blow account of what happened to her. If you’re a survivor, this show may be extremely triggering. It also deals with how the legal system handles sexual violence cases, including the ways in which survivors are systematically discredited and disbelieved.
The official website describes the play as suitable for ages 12+, but the cinema streaming was rated as a 15 certificate. I’d be extremely hesitant to let anyone younger than 15 see this, to be honest, and it’s likely to be challenging for even very mature teenagers.
Prima Facie: My Review
Jodie Comer in Prima Facie. Photo: Helen Murray.
Prima Facie runs at around 100 minutes with no interval, and is performed in its entirety by just one actor. As someone with a short attention span, I will admit I was a little unsure if any single performer, no matter how good, could hold my attention for over an hour and a half with no break.
I need not have worried because Jodie Comer, in the role of Tessa, is nothing short of mesmerising. She starts out exhuberant and energetic, swaggering and perhaps even arrogant in her belief in herself as a winner in the game of law. Though, as a working-class person in a field dominated by the wealthy and privileged, and as a woman in a still-too-male field, we cannot help but admire the space she has carved for herself and takes up unapologetically.
The change, following the night with her colleague Julian that culminates in him raping her, is as absolute as it is devastating. Comer completely sells the heartbreaking and complex reality of sexual trauma, giving us a woman who is both broken and brave, on the verge of giving up yet determined to keep going. Someone whose agency was stolen, but who will not allow her voice to go unheard.
Comer’s performance is relentlessly physical. She moves furniture around, jumps up on her desk, slides in and out of costume pieces before our eyes, hardly stopping for the entire hour and forty minutes. All of this is set to a powerful, pounding soundtrack by Rebecca Lucy Taylor, AKA Self Esteem.
The set, like Comer herself, is dynamic and constantly changing. Based at first around a barrister’s chambers, with a desk and leather chair and shelves upon shelves of case files, it moves around and pares back until, in the pivotal scene just after the rape, all we see is darkness and hammering rain and the tiny, vulnerable Tessa in the middle of a vast empty space.
When Comer is briefly offstage following this scene, projected numbers start from Day 1 and then roll through, slowly then fast then slowly again, all the way to Day 782. Aside from the obvious practical need for Comer to dry off and change, this shows the strange impact trauma has on memory, the ways in which time both expands and contracts in the weeks and months and years following a traumatic event.
The writing in Prima Facie is, perhaps, a little clunky towards the end. It verges on lecturing the audience in parts, falling into that eternal trap of “telling not showing”. But that criticism pales in comparison to the extraordinary performance that makes this production what it is. It’s part call-to-arms, part plea for change, part candle in the darkness for survivors, all brilliance.
I left the cinema feeling emotionally eviscerated. Torn open and wrung out. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a very, very long time.
Where to get tickets
Prima Facie has now finished its run at the Harold Pinter theatre, but many cinemas are still showing the play via NTLive in the next few weeks. Find your nearest screening and dates here. The play will also transfer to Broadway in spring 2023.