Review: Prima Facie is grounded in emotional truth
Prima Facie is an aria of desolation for the #MeToo age and one which exhibits a ravaged intimacy that critics of that movement won’t be able to blink away.
It was the hottest theatre ticket in London’s West End for months and now we’re getting the chance to see it in Australia via the National Theatre Live broadcasts. Prima Facie is a one hander in which Jodie Comer from Killing Eve plays a young barrister who begins full of utter buoyant self-confidence but gradually reveals herself as the crushed and desolated victim of the kind of sexual assault the world finds difficult to take seriously let alone find some upper middle class powerlord guilty of.
Jodie Comer is one of the more striking TV villainesses in the history of the medium and it’s not hard to imagine that the glitter and Slavonic sparkle of her performance in Killing Eve – which shows her upstaging such formidable figures as Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw – must have lured quite a few people into the theatre out of sheer curiosity to see this kind of histrionic bravura and sheer starriness up close but Prima Facie is also an aria of desolation for the #MeToo age and one which exhibits a ravaged intimacy that critics of that movement won’t be able to blink away.
It’s the work of an Australian playwright Suzie Miller who was mentored by Edward Albee of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fame and seems to have a marked interest in the dramatic potential of the law. Anna K gives her own forensic slant to the fact that it’s an adaptation of Tolstoy’s great novel and the production of this at Melbourne’s Malthouse in August is to be followed by the Sydney Theatre Company’s production in October/December of RBG, another one-hander, which is all about the American Supreme Court judge, famed for her liberalism, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Gilbert and Sullivan said that the law was the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent whereas Dickens said the law was an ass. At the opening of Prima Facie – the phrase means on the face of it, at first sight, with a strong implication of self-evidently – Jodie Comer seems to be a self-preening narcissistic brat who wouldn’t understand justice if it bit her on the bottom.
She cavorts, she capers, she shrills and whistles and proclaims her self-satisfaction as a defence barrister extraordinaire. The acting is in fact a bit too big for the actress’s boots. At least in this stage to screen transposition (and it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have had some element of excess even if you were watching it live.) Comer sports a broad Northern accent – which seems a bit improbable in the case of the intensely traditional British bar – and she scampers and preens with self-delight.
She tells us how she can see these awkward, oh so well bred, public (ie private) schoolboys coming as they fall over themselves in their desire for her. And, yes, she knows all about the tricks and graces and easy authority of private school girls too: she is the mistress of every art needful to the pursuit of her brilliant career in a world where she is a natural born star.
The narcissism of the star turn at the outset may be alluring or alienating or both. Then everything goes with predictable ease. The attention, the guy’s shyness, the grope, the grog, the ancient rituals of getting down to it: as familiar and effortless as the capering of one of nature’s top level careerists, amoral and out to win in an innocuous way.
She throws up a bit, why wouldn’t she, they’ve been hitting the bottle. Then – suddenly – it all seems to have nothing to do with her. They’re in bed but the hand against her face seems to be crushing the life out of her. He won’t let her push it away and nor, for a moment, does she have any choice about the penetration she has ceased to have the remotest desire for. It is nothing but a violation and nothing she does or says allows her any way out of a sexual encounter she experiences as the most aching desolation and the most annihilating desecration of the abject thing she has been reduced to.
You get the picture. She goes to the police and she’s convincing. Charges are laid against the smart young lawyer who took her conquest – and all the horror it involved for her – as his birthright, his piece of cake.
The days waiting for the trial run into hundreds of days of agony. It would be wrong to offer spoilers as to how Prima Facie turns out but there is nothing in its denouement that defies probability.
And in the process everything about the show goes into reverse. Jodie Comer who has looked like a bit of a show off of a star gives a rivetingly powerful performance as the young woman who is raped. She is broken and crushed and piteous and she pleads to the audience for justice and mercy – for justice as the only form mercy can take in a world where she has been denied choice.
It’s a breathtaking performance, all the more intimate and heartbreaking for the forensic fol de rol that has preceded it. She is so full of a forlorn hope which is also a form of dread as her quest for justice becomes, by necessity, a form of self-abasement, an abject and minimal thing in a diminished world.
There’s something weird about seeing Comer, such an eternally triumphing wicked woman in Killing Eve, reduced to the condition – the nearly literally unspeakable condition – of anybody’s girlfriend, anybody’s sister, on whom this not (when it all comes down to it) especially uncommon devastation has been visited.
Miller’s script is uncannily skilled in the way it effects the transition between the girl on the make and the ashen young woman whose existence has been reduced to the recollected fragments of something she said no to, even as it was transpiring, though no one bothered to hear her, or care if they did.
“It’s a breathtaking performance, all the more intimate and heartbreaking for the forensic fol de rol that has preceded it”
Prima Facie is brilliantly directed by Justin Martin with lightning costume changes and with the kind of lighting by Natasha Chivers that evokes a series of contrasted worlds through a shimmer of glimpsed suggestions.
This is the kind of show that may well summon up a world of sneers at its supposed woke pieties but the situation it presents will confound the very people it annoys if they allow themselves to see it in human terms.
Prima Facie is a polemical play that reflects a world which is in the process of shifting its sense of what can be tolerated in terms of sexual assault but it could not be more pertinent to the world that yielded the Brittany Higgins story. Nor does Suzie Miller back off from the legal difficulties these horrors pose.
Jodie Comer’s performance in Prima Facie is not flawless. It has its stridencies and excesses and missteps but it is a tour de force grounded in emotional truth and everyone who sees it will find it unforgettable.
This is a different kind of offering from National Theatre Live – a famous TV star with a visceral grasp of the spectacular nature of the emotional atrocity she’s delineating. Everyone will be taken aback by its rawness and its power.
Prima Facie is in select Australian cinemas from July 23. Anna K premieres at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre on August 12.