Jodie Comer to star in Broadway and film versions of searing #MeToo play Prima Facie
Suzie Miller’s searing #MeToo play about rape and the law is heading to Broadway – and to Australian cinemas – and will have lawyers and judges flocking to see it.
When it was first suggested that British powerhouse Jodie Comer could star in the West End production of Suzie Miller’s hit play Prima Facie, the Australian dramatist asked: “Who is she?”
No, Miller had not been living under a rock: she had seen Comer’s “astonishing” Emmy award-winning turn as the mercurial assassin Villanelle in the television series Killing Eve. But because of the performer’s heavily accented portrayal of the psychopathic killer, Miller assumed – wrongly – that she was Russian.
“Why would we cast a Russian actor?’’ the playwright asked her collaborators on the West End show, producer James Bierman and director Justin Martin. The writer recalls: “They were like, ‘She’s not Russian, she’s English!’ And I was like, ‘You are kidding! She is so amazing.’ ”
Her over-size tortoiseshell glasses flanked by curtains of blonde hair, Miller tells this anecdote – ending with an incredulous hiccup of laughter – as we sit in a cafe in Sydney’s inner west. The former lawyer is a warm, gregarious personality who has a penchant for self-deprecating anecdotes in which she is the punchline.
Comer was duly cast and made her West End debut in Miller’s play in April. British critics hailed the Liverpudlian’s performance as Tessa – a defence lawyer who ends up on the other side of the witness stand after she is sexually assaulted – as “breathtaking”, “a tour de force”, “masterful” and “gutsy”. Such is the two-time BAFTA winner’s pulling power, the production sold out before opening night, while it was recently announced she will reprise her role on Broadway next year.
Miller says of Prima Facie heading to Broadway: “It’s like a writer’s dream; a playwright’s dream, really. You sort of live in hope of that all your life and I have worked very, very hard. Some people go ‘Oh did it happen overnight?’ and I think, ‘Oh, if you only had any idea of how much work is involved.’ ”
The dramatist and screenwriter says Prima Facie, a stinging critique of how the justice system treats sexual assault victims, premiered in Australia in 2019 and “it’s going all over the world next year – it’s so bizarre. It’s going to Japan, Italy and Germany, all sorts of places. I can’t keep up with it, to be honest. It’s actually got its own life … its own momentum.”
Miller reflects how her one-woman drama has “hit a zeitgeist” in the #MeToo era. “It’s quite astonishing,” she says. “It’s the Jodie Comer factor as well. She is a megastar and she’s got a huge fan base.”
Now Australians can see the British star blazing her way through Miller’s taut playscript in the National Theatre Live filmed version of the West End show. The NT Live broadcast will be released in Australian cinemas on July 23 and potentially will be seen by a vast worldwide audience: according to Miller, it will screen in almost 3000 cinemas across the globe, including 700 in the UK alone.
Comer – who recently starred opposite Matt Damon in The Last Duel and Ryan Reynolds in video game caper Free Guy – says she is “delighted that our production of Prima Facie will be available to watch in cinemas across the world … This is another way that we can make sure that this play is accessible to anyone that would like to see it.”
In a roundtable discussion that is part of the NT Live broadcast, she says she was “really shocked” to learn of the stress sexual assault victims are put under in court – from “intrusive” questioning to the pressure to secure a guilty verdict. “I was really taken aback by that,” she says.
When we first meet Comer’s Tessa, she is a hard-driving defence barrister from a working-class background who loves to cross-examine witnesses, firing off questions “like bullets” until an “utter annihilation” is achieved. “It is the game, the game of law!” she declares. However, when she is raped by a colleague she has just started dating, she is forced to rethink her belief that the only kind of truth that matters is “legal truth”.
Comer delivers flashes of sly, conspiratorial humour that Killing Eve fans will recognise, along with an emotional intensity that is off the Richter scale, without succumbing to melodrama. Martin tells Review: “Jodie is utterly fearless … Every time she acts, she goes for it and gives you everything. She’s born for the stage. And can make you laugh one minute and cry the next. It’s extraordinary.”
“She has to carry the entire play,” Miller says. The writer, who attended every rehearsal with Comer, says she and Martin would check on her after her “marathon of physicality” at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London, “and she’d go ‘I’m fine – Can we go for a drink?’ And we’re all stressed. She’s an absolute trouper. She’s really gonna be the next Meryl Streep. And she’s only 29.”
Surprisingly, Miller reveals that Comer “was so grateful for the role. I think she felt she was shut out of theatre a little bit because people saw her as a screen actor and she didn’t go to theatre school.” Tessa was only the British actor’s second stage role “but we just had a really strong feeling about her. I had a long conversation with her before we offered her the role; she was so hungry for it … And I thought, ‘Gosh, she’s such a star, I don’t think she realises that we’re very excited to have her!’ ”
Miller is writing a feature film adaptation of Prima Facie – a deal will be announced soon – as well as screen adaptations of her play Dust, about a huge storm engulfing Perth, and the Heather Rose novel Bruny. In fact, the same writer who once struggled to get her works staged in Australia has been “inundated” with offers of screen work. She is scripting a television series for Matchbox Pictures and a rom-com, while two of her new plays, Anna K and RBG: Of Many, One, will premiere soon at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre and the Sydney Theatre Company respectively.
The playwright is married to NSW Appeal Court judge Robert Beech-Jones and she wrote Prima Facie because “I really wanted to explore a woman’s lived experience (of sexual assault and the law) rather than the tropes we see on television – we see a re-enactment with the man sort of terrorising the woman.”
She reveals she once worked as a defence lawyer, thinking she was fighting for the underdog – the accused. Then she realised that in many sexual assault cases – which have notoriously low conviction rates – the underdog was often the victim. “That made it very tricky because a lot of people don’t agree with me.” The legal system, Miller argues, is “not about justice as such. We say that it is, but it’s actually not looking for justice. It’s making sure there’s enough checks and balances to keep any innocent person out of prison.”
She has been writing plays since the early 2000s and is clearly enjoying her international success, but it wasn’t always this way. Indeed, the reason she started partly basing herself in England 12 or so years ago is that she felt Australian theatre companies weren’t much interested in women’s perspectives back then. “I’d see every program and there’d be maybe one show (by a woman). And I’d say ‘Why?’ because I’d come from law where there was more parity … It was taste. It was the taste of artistic directors who really weren’t interested in women’s stories.”
Prima Facie won the Griffin Theatre Award in 2018, earning it a place in the small but respected Sydney company’s 2019 season. It was championed by Griffin’s artistic director at the time, Lee Lewis, who later programmed it at Queensland Theatre, the flagship company she now leads. The play also won the Australian Writers Guild’s 2020 AWGIE major award and the David Williamson Prize for Excellence in Writing for Australian Theatre.
Yet it was initially rejected by various Australian companies, which Miller doesn’t name. “I did get knock-backs,” she says, with a slightly rueful laugh. She concedes the ongoing diversity push means women and non-Anglo playwrights now get a better run in local theatre. “Things have changed,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of men who are feeling it’s hard for them now. It’s interesting because you didn’t even know that half of the competition was out of the game 10 years ago … Now you’ve got the whole competition.”
Prima Facie is infused with sharp legal insights and in-jokes – and lawyers and judges flocked to the Australian and British productions. For the West End show, Miller adapted the script to better reflect the British legal system and recalls how “Justin (the director) and I went along to meet with a judge who was a friend of ours, who had volunteered to have a chat”. Instead they were greeted with a formal lunch and a sea of judges and London aldermen who had gathered at the Old Bailey. Miller and the director were dressed down in jeans and backpacks. “We sort of waltzed in there and it’s laid out, silver service,” she says, chuckling at the memory.
She is “very excited” the two plays she wrote during pandemic lockdowns are about to be unveiled. In August, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre will stage Anna K, about a high-profile television journalist whose career unravels because of a single tweet and an affair with a younger man. Miller says this work – inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – is an interrogation of how women in the public eye endure harsher social media scrutiny and abuse than their male counterparts. “It’s almost like a burning of a witch at the stake,” she says. “You burn the witch and then you also say to other women, ‘See what happens when you open your mouth,’ and nobody really does anything about it.”
In October, another new Miller work, RBG: Of Many, One, opens at STC. Like Prima Facie, it’s a one-woman play; a portrait of trailblazing US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020 and fiercely advocated for the separation of powers, gender justice and women’s reproductive rights.
Miller studied Ginsburg’s judgments to research this work, which will explore “how amazing she was but also how human she was”. Interestingly, she says Ginsburg criticised the reasoning behind the US Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark abortion rights ruling, Roe v Wade. According to Miller, Ginsburg predicted the court’s pro-abortion ruling eventually would be overturned because it was based “on a woman’s right to privacy and not on women’s rights and their bodies. Everyone thought she was being really negative at the time, but she was actually right.”
A mother of two adult children, Miller was mentored by the great dramatist Edward Albee and in 2010 she, her husband and kids moved to London for 18 months when “I was first taking off in terms of developing my career there”. She now divides her time between London and Sydney – often heading straight to rehearsals from the nearest airport – and rejects the notion this globetrotting lifestyle is glamorous. “It’s not at all,” she protests. “It’s just a necessity, really, because I have so much work over there, but I have a husband and children here.”
Her plays often tackle social or legal injustice and have been staged by Griffin, Brisbane’s La Boite and Perth’s Black Swan companies, the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh Festival, New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre and Opera Queensland – for the latter, she wrote the libretto for an edgy, reimagined version of Snow White in 2016.
Miller grew up in Melbourne and was the first person in her family to go to university; this mirrors the experience of her Prima Facie heroine, Tessa. Like Tessa, as a newbie lawyer Miller found herself “doing everything backwards in high heels to make sure you’re matching up with what everyone else is doing”.
Prima Facie suggests the justice system is heavily weighted against sexual assault victims. But do “he said-she said” cases of alleged rape where there is no corroborating evidence, no physical injury and no independent witnesses pose a dilemma for courts that may want to do better by women? Miller responds: “Everyone asks me what the solutions are and the truth is, it’s so complicated.”
One remedy, she says, is boosting community awareness of the nuances of consent, “because juries are making these decisions based on their lived experience and their understanding about what sexual assault is and about rape myths – that women who wear certain things or get drunk are actually asking for certain assaults to happen to them. And the myth that you can’t rape someone you’ve already had sex with.”
Interestingly, the Prima Facie UK production supported the Schools Consent Program, a charity in which barristers visit schools and talk about the legal definition of consent, by making donations to the non-profit and offering free tickets to some students. A society-wide “mind shift” over such issues is required, says Miller, adding: “People are starting to recognise there’s a possibility of changing it (the justice system) so it really hears women in court. There used to be times where they would hold people’s underwear up in the court and they would say ‘Is that what you were wearing?’ ”
As Prima Facie continues its trajectory across the globe, she reflects: “The play is just the beginning of a conversation, and the conversation is more important than anything else – more important than the entertainment value.”
Prima Facie is in select Australian cinemas from July 23. Anna K premieres at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre on August 12. RBG: Of Many, One opens at the Sydney Theatre Company on October 29.