Erin Harrington reviews Prima Facie, by Suzie Miller, presented by Kavanah Productions, at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Wednesday 6 November 2024.
Criminal defence barrister Tess (Mel Dodge) is successful and hard-edged. She’s a working-class girl who’s made it alongside privileged private school boys thanks to grit, brains, and a vicious competitive streak. She proclaims her love for the ‘game’ of law, for the adrenaline and the kudos. She says she believes in the system as a form of justice, as if institutions and rules just fall out of the sky and aren’t built by people and power. She’s a steak lover who doesn’t care too much where the meat comes from.
Australian playwright Suzie Miller’s multi award-winning one woman play Prima Facie – “based on first impression” – works to test the way the justice system treats sexual assault cases in the same way Tess tests evidence and witnesses, by poking relentlessly at gaps and soft spots until things fall apart. Tess is raped by someone she trusts, and then attempts to seek justice, but she finds herself on the pointy end of a system that she has held up as infallible. It’s a searing 100-minute indictment of a system gone wrong. After all, if a criminal defence lawyer skilled at representing rapists can’t navigate a process seemingly optimised to re-victimise victims, in a world where sexual violence is rife, what hope does anyone else have? The play has been widely translated and performed since its debut in Sydney in 2017, and it sits as a fine example of the way art might prompt real-world change. This touring production, from Kavanah Productions, is also angled at local lawyers, who can get professional development credits for attendance – a worthy initiative.
Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s confident production starts already near full-throttle. Tess rips around the stage, narrating the thrilling action of the courtroom like a horse race that she knows she’ll win. She and her colleagues are ‘thoroughbreds’, champions focused on the race. Mel Dodge’s physical, impassioned performance doesn’t let up; she’s moving so fast she’s gasping for breath a little even from the play’s opening. We stay in the present tense with Tess as we learn more about her colleagues, her friendships, her work life and her working-class family – the world she’s built for herself brick by brick – and then as she experiences first the violence of the rape and then the violence of the courtroom. These elements are sensitively staged. The action becomes concentrated in its final moments, Dodge glued to her seat in the dock, eyes shifting between her mother, her colleagues, the perptrator, his supporters, all the while thrumming with energy, pain and rage.
The pared-back production design leans towards grim, professional neutrals – grey rostra, conservative business wear, then looser casual wear. It ask us to look for the human element within institutions that hide their sense of threat behind a veneer of respectability. The play’s powerful message is literally shouted from the stage: a system that puts victims on trial has to change.
Prima Facie is a slightly tricky play, in that its full-throated account of power and gendered, structural injustice walks a line between personal narrative and polemic. This assertive production gives us anger, and hurt, lots of big energy, but not a lot of light and shade. Perhaps this is an effect of the size of the Isaac Theatre Royal, and the fact that the sometimes-intrusive soundscape is programmed too loud. Projected elements, which are a little hard to discern upstage, very literally illustrate Tess’s shattering sense of certainty in the law in ways that feel didactic. Perhaps I would feel differently in a more intimate space, or on a night where Donald Trump, rapist and felon, hadn’t just been voted back in. Whatever the case, seated in the dress circle, I feel pushed away, as if there isn’t a place in the middle where I, as an audience member, can come to co-inhabit the work in the moment. Judging by the audience’s response others clearly don’t feel the same way. Some are on their feet at the end, but I leave feeling a little like I’ve been told something I already know well, rather than having been brought along, heartbeat by heartbeat, on one woman’s journey from callousness and to compassion.
Prima Facie plays at the Issac Theatre Royal until Friday 8 November, 2024.
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