My play of 2024: Prima Facie

When acting and educating combine perfectly

I know we were late to the game in watching The National Theatre Live’s cinema release of Prima Facie (we still haven’t see Nye yet). This Anglicisation of an Australian one-woman play had received rave reviews and many of my friends had already seen it by the time we went to one of our local cinemas for our reckoning with Jody Comer.

I must admit to a certain resistance to Jody Comer. I watched the first series of Killing Eve and her brilliance felt so easy it was like being a fan of The Beatles: too mainstream for me. Yet the first thing to say about Prima Facie is indeed what everyone says: Jody Comer is brilliant. As it happens, I also saw a different one actor play this year, and while that reminded me just how hard it must be to hold the attention of an audience alone, all the while trying to inhabit a variety of characters with enough … variety to make them distinguishable and yet also to ensure continuity, I forgot all that very quickly during Prima Facie. Comer talks to the audience directly, so we feel as though we are hearing the most complex pub tale ever told.

Not that this is a pub tale. It is a very ordinary, commonplace horror story. Tessa is a working class interloper in the world of the bar. Through brief introductory scenes we feel her tenuous grip on her new identity as a defence lawyer, including for those accused of sexual assault. She is a hard working, hard partying young woman who is just beginning to allow herself some feelings for a colleague that she’s had sex with in an office late one night. If you are looking for black and white with clear boundaries this play won’t provide you with them. Rather, playwright Suzie Miller wants you to feel the messiness of consent in the moment, and the almost total inadequacy of the law to deal with sex crimes in our current age.

The grim inevitability of the second half of the play is dramatic in its own way. The revictimisation of a sexual assault victim is only heightened by this particular victim’s intricate knowledge of how she will be not just revictimised, but destroyed as a person. Anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘Why don’t women come forward immediately when they are assaulted?’ needs to see this play.

It’s often commented that in Islam, a woman’s legal testimony counts as half the testimony of a man. Have a think about current news reports about abusive celebrity men in the UK. It turns out that our society needs dozens of women all reporting together before we believe them over the man. We have a problem. It’s not Prima Facie’s problem that it hasn’t come up with a solution, but it asks us all to participate in that journey of discovery.