look to your left, look to your right: the brilliance of 'National Theatre Live: Prima Facie' (2022)

& the brilliance of Jodie Comer, Suzie Miller, and Justin Martin

On Sunday, I saw a screening of Prima Facie (2022) in cinema and oh my, it was incredible.

Synopsis: Tessa Ensler is a young, defence barrister who has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today. She is in perfect form and her impeccable cross-examination skills enable her to win case after case. That is, until an unexpected and awful event forces her to rethink everything she knows and believes about criminal law.

** Spoilers below, be warned <3 **

The production opens with Tessa (Jodie Comer) recounting how she won her most recent case. She tells the audience, in extended monologues layered with humour, of everything she has learned about being a criminal defence lawyer.

A lawyer’s job is not to know. It’s to not know.

She remarks that people often ask how she can sleep at night, knowing that she is possibly getting criminals, particularly rapists, off without punishment.

You don’t play God.

Tessa tells the audience of her time in law school. She was the only one who had come from a working class background. Her professor told her class, “Look to your left, look to your right. One of you will not graduate as a lawyer.”

Due process is everything.

She explains that, in cases of sexual assault, it’s not up to her if she believes the victim or not. Her job, or role, is to cross-examine the victim and poke holes in their story, to make the jury wonder, Are they telling the whole truth?

And the law, it’s there to protect everyone.

The main set is a law office, with case file upon case file stacked on shelving around the entire set. When Tessa talks of one particular sexual assault case and the tactics she used to scrutinise the woman’s story, she picks up the case file. When she returns the case file to the shelf, it lights up temporarily. The light fades, and it isn’t mentioned at the time, but it proved to be a very important point for later in the play.

The only way the system works is because we all play our roles.

It’s not emotional for me, it’s the game. It’s the game of law.

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And then, it happens to her.

What follows is a traumatising ordeal of belittlement, not being believed, and having her privacy not only invaded, but absolutely annihilated.

The police officer who she tells her story to jokes about how it’s ironic that a defence barrister suddenly needs the police, when she usually is working against them.

She is judged for having showered after the assault and for deleting texts from the offender.

She is violated and dehumanised.

Her knowledge of criminal law, particularly her knowledge of sexual assault cases, haunts her. She knows that her attacker will likely not be found guilty, that her story will be poked and prodded until she breaks. She knows because she has been the one doing the poking and prodding all through her career.

But, with immense bravery and incredible writing by Suzie Miller, Tessa chooses to take her attacker to court anyway.

I haven’t read the screenplay so I am not sure if this was a choice of Miller’s or by the director, Justin Martin, but after she decides to take her case to court, there is a beautifully gut-wrenching montage of the amount of days that pass until her actual court date.

782 days.

Seven hundred and eighty-two days.

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When she finally makes it to court, Tessa is judged, scrutinised, and made to question her own story. It is the very same tactics that she used against victims in the past and it destroys her to think that she caused innocent people to suffer from the same pain that she is currently experiencing. Jodie Comer, while phenomenal during the entire performance, acts exceptionally well during the court scenes.

She loses.

However, she delivers a breathtakingly emotional speech in the final moments of the court scene, where she tells her story firmly and assuredly, and she explains how the system needs to change. Miller employs repetition from Tessa’s speech earlier in the play to make this point exceptionally clear:

“One in three women. Look to your left. Look to your right. It’s one of us.”

The play ends with Tessa putting her own case file on the shelving. It lights up as the stage fades to black. One by one, other case files begin to light up in a starkly obvious display of the system’s failure to protect women and, more generally, victims of sexual assault.

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Ultimately, Prima Facie is incredibly poignant and, while uncomfortable to watch, exceedingly important. Suzie Miller’s screenplay is fantastic, Justin Miller’s directing is fantastic, and Jodie Comer is simply beyond fantastic.

★★★★★