‘Prima Facie’: A One-Woman Play on Rape and Justice

A review of ‘Prima Facie’, by Suzie Miller; National Theatre Live, 2024.

I would at least like to believe that by now, every thinking person has worked out that there is something wrong with the way we try rape cases. The legal system rests on facts and logic, wrapped up in a compelling story. And yet we know that. woman who has been raped is often incoherent, unable to give an exact account of what has happened. Indeed, if she can give an exact account, it is a red flag.

Prima Facie rests on a straightforward conceit: What if a defence lawyer used to defending those accused of rape were raped herself? The woman at issue, played by Jodie Comer, tells this story in the present tense. She is a working-class woman from a single-parent home in Liverpool who has been accepted to Cambridge University. Here she encounters those working alongside whom she will spend her career. They are invariably people dealt a good hand by Fate: they are often born to successful lawyers and have attended private schools. Consequently they are full of self-belief.

She is a working-class woman from a single-parent home in Liverpool who has been accepted to Cambridge.

But our heroine does well. Despite her disadvantages she graduates from Cambridge, takes the Bar, and is accepted by a good Chambers. Here she racks up a number of victories, with one such rendered at the opening of the play. She is convinced that the system of which she is a part, and for which she is an ambassador, is just. She is untroubled by the thought that the clients she stands for might be guilty. Her job is not to pass judgement, she says: it is to present the best possible version of that person’s case. If all lawyers do the same, the system works.

And then she gets raped.

So the heart of this play is the experience of being raped and having been raped, and its central claim is that the British justice system, by historical necessity built and shaped by men, is ill-equipped to deal well with rape cases and bring rapists to justice. It stresses phenomenology: sexual assault and its aftermath through the eyes of the victim. I do not know how one would go about changing the British legal system (which, thanks the common law tradition, is generally considered to be effective and has been widely imitated) to try rape cases more effectively. For obvious reasons it is not workable in any legal proceeding simply to believe someone if they have no evidence in their favour. I am sure there are some very clever people trying to work this out.

But in my mind the play, for all the rave reviews it has received, has problems. Comer’s Liverpuddlian accent is always slipping; she is not hugely likeable; and there is something that seems jarring, almost cruelly ironic, about telling the story of something that the play says happens to one in three women and yet features just one woman, and a woman who, despite her humble origins, has reached a position of acute privilege. Is Miller attempting to say that rape can happen to anyone, be carried out by anyone? Is she trying to say we only understand the universal through the particular? I cannot help but feel I am trying to persuade myself that I liked this play more than I did. Art should chiefly be felt, not thought about. For me, a film like Alien, viewed through a feminist lens, has far more unsettling things to say about rape and the threat of rape: its universalism, its presence.

I cannot help but feel I am trying to persuade myself that I liked this play more than I did.

As with much contemporary art, I had the impression watching Prima Facie that someone was trying to make a point to me and not very subtly. This was not helped – and I do not think this is a spoiler – by the lengthy speech given towards the end, a speech in which the few things left unsaid were said explicitly. Needless to say its subject matter, and the questions it raises, are important ones that we perhaps do not ask enough in our culture, at least through our art; but I would rather read Laura Bates on the virtual decriminalisation of rape, or Louise Perry on sexual politics, both to learn more about this and – I think, crucially – why rape happens in the first place and its connection to culture.

Not for the first time I find myself (and my wife, who hated the play) in a tiny minority. Miller has re-worked her play into a novel; Comer has received a Tony Award; and a film adaption produced by Bunya Productions and starring Cynthia Erivo has been announced. I am left to wonder (call me cynical if you wish): to what extent has the message of the film, as against its overall merit as a work of drama, persuaded critics to like it?