Queensland Theatre’s latest offering Prima Facie is the perfect Covid era production

All you really need for a great night out at the theatre is one actor and a chair but Suzie Miller’s powerful play about sexual assault and the law doesn’t need any frills

Sheridan Harbridge, the star of Queensland Theatre’s latest offering Prima Facie.

Who needs a big cast and elaborate sets? Queensland Theatre’s latest offering is so pared back yet so powerful that it could spell the end of theatre as we know it.

Why spend all that money on a big production when all it takes is a great actor and a brilliant script? Prima Facie, which is on at the Bille Brown Theatre until August 7, has both.

Sheridan Harbridge is the actor concerned and she is brilliant as Tessa, a lawyer from a working class background who finds herself on the other side of the fence after a sexual assault by a colleague.

This play, directed by Queensland Theatre’s Lee Lewis and originally done at her previous company, Griffin, in Sydney, is a minimalist piece and all the more powerful for it.

Sometimes this is the best kind of theatre.

I mean compare this to Queensland Theatre’s recent production of Taming of The Shrew which had a big cast and complicated sets but was nowhere near as good as this.

Maybe this is the way of the future?

It certainly costs less to put on. I have seen some great one person shows and I love them.

One of the best I ever saw was John Bell’s solo Moby Dick which involved him on stage wearing a maritime sweater with a chair and a bit of rope and that was about it. Brilliant.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller is a powerful minimalist theatrical experience

There’s even less frills in Prima Facie, just a chair and an actor (and some ambient lighting and sound) and what a fine actor she is.

Harbridge’s performance is a tour de force and when you leave the theatre you will wonder how she managed to remember it all.

The script is clear but complex in another way dealing, as it does, with legal as well as personal matters. Playwright Suzie Miller is a former lawyer so she knows what she is talking about and what she has written is a cri de couer.

She wants to reform the law around legal assault and while activism and campaigning doesn’t always make for good theatre in this instance it does.

Harbridge shows us a sassy, confident young lawyer who knows how things work and who knows how to play the game. It’s a fascinating insight into the way lawyers deal with moral and other issues.

Sheridan Harbridge is brilliant in Prima Facie. Pic by Brett Boardman.

But when things turn bad for her that very same legal system that she prides herself on having navigated works against her as she enters her own personal hell.

I went along with trepidation thinking it might all be too confronting and while it is confronting, as it has to be, it is also entertaining and there is, earlier in the piece, plenty of humour.

Harbridge is front and centre for one hour and forty minutes and that time just flies by as she delivers Miller’s considered and compelling words.

This play is the reason you go the theatre and while it’s hard work for Harbridge it’s a gift for a theatre company although it’s not so great for actors who must curse these one person shows due to the lack of employment opportunity. But I know a lot of actors will be attending because it is, among other things, an acting masterclass.

queenslandtheatre.com.au