• Prima Facie (NT Live), 8/25/22 (Thurs)

This one-woman show by Suzie Miller, originally presented in her native Australia, had received extremely strong reviews in its London debut, and the NT Live film itself set new records (though the play itself wasn’t an NT production – not sure how that works). Jodie Comer, apparently a young television star, won raves for her work. I’m usually wary of one-woman pieces since they tend these days to be self-centered rantings about female empowerment aimed at female audiences. Still, Fleabag worked out pretty well, so I decided to chance it.

A lawyer specializing in sexual assault cases gets her kicks from defending men from accusations of rape. She doesn’t bother with the question of whether her clients are actually guilty, arguing that her job is to defend them regardless of the truth. She takes advantage of the women’s reluctance to come forward in public, their difficulty in recalling or recounting the details of the incident years later (cases take more than two years to reach trial), and the near impossibility of proving what amounts to a he-said-she-said event. It’s only when she herself is raped by a colleague that she realizes how the system is stacked against the victim, bringing the incidents from an abstract point of law to the human level.

The lawyer’s story is more personal in the first half, especially in her vivid reconstruction of the drunken night that led to her defilement. But it then takes a turn from entertainment to lecture, which quickly became tiresome. Her contention that one of every three women is sexually assaulted at some point seems a massive stretch (I assume that the Australian writer is referring to the UK here); I suspect sexual assault is being very broadly defined. But all we get is the screaming. An average two-year wait for a trial is certainly way too long and utterly unfair, a wrong that needs righting immediately if true. But the lawyer seems to be questioning the trial process itself, i.e., the right of the accused to defend themselves, which didn’t sit right with me. There are too many cases at least in the US where unproven and highly tenuous accusations of rape have been hugely damaging to the innocent, as in the Duke lacrosse case and more recently the Kavanaugh affair. Even in the case described in the show, I’d want to hear the other side before making any assumptions or judgments. The play falters badly in its logic.

The one saving grace, and it’s a big one, is Comer’s titanic performance. She bursts out of the gate like the thoroughbreds she describes and remains in high energy throughout, whether discussing her triumphs or her despair. The sharp turnabout from her drunken sex-filled night out to the moment of the rape and its aftermath was a virtual master class in acting. The rapid-fire monologue, delivered almost breathlessly, would be intolerable in most hands, but she carries it off through sheer stage presence. This is unbelievably Comer’s stage debut, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be her last. While she didn’t make the material any more convincing, she definitely made it worth watching.

The cinematography deserves a hand of its own. They did a fantastic job of following the actress just enough to make it clear that this is a stage work rather than a film, even showing the audience at times. The NT has become expert at this even outside its own walls (this was performed in the Harold Pinter Theatre), and this piece is a model for others.

Well worth watching for the performance. Shame about the polemic.