THEATRE
Prima Facie by Suzie Miller by Melbourne Theatre Company
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
At Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne until 25 March 2023
Stars: ****
This review is published only on this blog but I'll give a radio review on Arts Weekly on Sat 25 Feb 20223. KH
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| Sheridan Harbridge in PrimaFacie_photo by Brett Boardman |
Suzie Miller’s play, Prima Facie, smacks you in the face with its rapid-paced dialogue and energetic performance by Sheridan Harbridge, but its hardest slap comes from the deeply troubling themes of sexual assault and the treatment of female rape victims in the justice system.
Harbridge, alone on an almost empty stage, plays Tess Ensler, a successful defence barrister with 11 years post-qualification experience. She prides herself on her continuing winning streak and high-octane performance in court, her relentless, even heartless cross examination of witnesses and her pseudo-sensitive questioning of rape victims that unravels their evidence making their stories sound flimsy, ill-considered, poorly remembered, unlikely or, even worse, fabricated and false.
Miller’s dialogue conjures the courtroom, barristers’ chambers, Tess’s apartment and her working-class mum’s suburban home. Harbridge, unobtrusively directed by Lee Lewis, speaks directly, energetically and gleefully to the audience as Tess, intermittently dropping into the voices of other characters in Tess’s story: judges, barristers, colleagues, her mother, defendants, witnesses and victims.
Tess is a Rottweiler in the courtroom, going for the jugular to bring down her prey. She is passionate about winning – rather than being passionate about justice. However, Tess’s mischievous delight in winning at all costs – despite the adverse impact on her “victims” – evaporates when she becomes a sexual assault victim herself at the hands of a seemingly warm and gentle colleague.
As a victim, Tess must now contend with escalating trauma, confusion, unclear recollections, errors of judgment, awkward text messages from her (alleged) rapist and, 763 days later, an unfamiliar role as the beleaguered victim in her own rape case in a courtroom filled with men. Tess’s predicament has an icy edge when she recognises the barrister’s cunning tactics, but she is helpless in the face of such insensitivity that verges on cruelty.
Time shifts backward and forwards from the grim reality of “Now” to the promise and adventure of “Then”, including a snapshot of the Dean of her law school telling first-year students that one in three of their number would never become a lawyer. It was not going to be her!
Harbridge’s Tess is articulate, impassioned, belligerent and very ambitious, having come from a working-class background and beaten all those privileged, private school graduates to reach such heady heights in the Law. Her energy and excitement enliven the character but also cause her to blur some lines in the first half and she does not always clearly evoke other characters through voice, accent and physicality.
The play finishes on Tess’s final, long but heartfelt lecture about the injustice of the justice system for rape victims, but this dramatic device is too didactic and bolted on to make good drama and is too obviously the writer’s voice. Yes, it appeals to our sense of injustice and compels the opening night audience to leap to its feet as one; not, it seems, necessarily because of the quality of the production, but more likely because they agree wholeheartedly with Miller’s criticism of the justice system – as they should.
by Kate Herbert
Cast
Tess Ensler -Sheridan Harbridge
Creative Team
Director – Lee Lewis
Set & Costume – Renee Mulder
Lighting Designer – Trent Suidgeest
Composer & Sound Designer – Paul Charlier
Stage Manager – Katie Hankin
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