Prima Facie playwright Suzie Miller: ‘We should be able to go out, get drunk, party and walk home without being afraid’

The former lawyer’s play starring Jodie Comer, about a defence barrister who is raped, is a fierce indictment of the legal system. She tells Ellie Harrison why the court is not fit for purpose when it comes to sexual assault

Suzie Miller with Prima Facie’s star Jodie Comer (Helen Murray)

At the halfway point of Suzie Miller’s one-woman tour de force, Prima Facie, the mood changes in a snap. Having swaggered and wisecracked her way around the stage for the first hour, Jodie Comer’s barrister Tessa Ensler seems to shrink, folding in on herself, unsure how to move or what to say. She has just been raped by a colleague. Someone she liked, who she’d fantasised about a future with.

Miller once worked with sexual assault survivors regularly, having been a criminal defence lawyer in the human rights sector in her native Australia. She would notice that many of the rape statements she took shared parallels. “When it was someone the victim knew,” she tells me, “everything was going fine, until suddenly it wasn’t. It takes their psyche a while to catch up with the fact that they’re moving into dangerous territory. Then when it’s happening, they’re thinking, ‘No, no, no, this can’t be happening with this guy I’m on a date with. I was thinking about having breakfast and a relationship with him.’ Your mind goes into ways to reinterpret the narrative, thinking maybe he’s making a mistake, but by that stage it’s already really violent, and then the victim blames themself for not knowing that was ahead, for thinking the perpetrator was someone they could trust.”

The survivors that Miller encountered back then would inspire Prima Facie, about a woman who defends men accused of sexual assault, who is then raped herself. It has been hailed by critics as a “roaring drama” and “a punch to the guts”, while The Independent called Comer’s performance “steely, agile, remarkable”. The play first ran in Sydney in 2019, with Australian actor Sheridan Harbridge, and won several major awards there including the Writers’ Guild Award for Drama. It’s now showing at London’s Harold Pinter theatre, and Miller couldn’t be happier it travelled to the UK first. “I’ve never met an actor as hardworking as Jodie,” she says, adding that, having grown up watching the BBC, “British actors have characters in their blood”. It also meant the play didn’t need tweaking that much – the Australian legal system is templated on the British one, and the conviction rate for sexual assault cases is similarly pitifully low.

The show is Comer’s West End debut and practically her first ever time on stage – she’s been in only one play before, in Scarborough, when she was 16. “I think Jodie was like, ‘What do I do afterwards, do I bow?’” Miller recalls. A few days before I speak to Miller, I attend the first night of previews, and when the curtains rise and reveal Comer in court dress, her feet up on a table in chambers, the audience erupts into whoops and cheers. She’s not even done anything yet, but by the end of the play – a breathless, brutal two hours – there’s a several-minute standing ovation, lots of blubbing, and Comer at the front of the stage, awkwardly bowing.

After studying playwriting while working as a lawyer, Miller left the bar to be a full-time playwright in 2010. She’s written many plays since then, but Prima Facie was always in the back of her mind – when the MeToo movement took hold, she knew it was the right time to bring the script to life. She was staggered by the ubiquity of sexual assault in women’s lives. “Every woman I know has had a near-miss experience, an experience that was really borderline, or an experience where it’s later dawned on them that they weren’t consenting. It really is endemic. How is it possible that more than 50 per cent of the population are subjected to or threatened with this so often, and it’s not talked about in a way that we expect change?”

There’s a sobering moment in the play where Comer asks each audience member to look to their left, then their right. It’s used to drive a shocking statistic home: one in three women experience physical or sexual violence. As Miller and I end our call, the story about DJ Tim Westwood’s alleged sexual misconduct, spanning 25 years, breaks.

With Prima Facie, Miller wanted to show that rape is not always “someone grabbing you and dragging you into the bushes”. “More often than not,” she says, “it’s someone you know, someone you like.” To prosecute, the court prefers evidence of a fight-or-flight reaction from the victim, explains Miller. But because law was written through a male lens, it often doesn’t take into account “freeze or friend”, when a victim tries to befriend their attacker in order to placate them and survive. “That is very hard for the court to compute,” she says. “The law has to change to fit that. The system is not hearing women’s voices.” She notes that reform has already taken place – but not enough. “It’s laughable now that in the Nineties it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife. Hopefully, in the future, it will be laughable that we expected women to convince us they were raped.”

Prima Facie’s run has coincided with the release of Anatomy of a Scandal on Netflix, a drama that looks at the damage a rape accusation can do to a man’s reputation. The accuser in the series, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to exist outside of her relationship to her attacker or the courtroom where she gives evidence. Miller was not interested in writing a story like that.

“There’s been enough said about men being wrongly accused,” she says. “That’s what the law has been shaped around – the idea of not wanting to wrongly accuse a man. Well, we also don’t want to wrongly let a woman have to walk the streets thinking it was her fault. Sexual assault has long-term effects on some women – serious mental health problems if they’re not believed and it’s secret and shameful. I lost lots of clients to suicide because it’s just overwhelming to think they have to carry this, and the feel they get from the community that it takes two to tango and they must have done something to invite this in.”

Comer as swaggering, wise-cracking defence barrister Tessa (Helen Murray)

Comer performs in her Liverpool accent in the play – except when she’s in court. There, her vowels lengthen, her consonants harden. Miller grew up in a working-class family in Melbourne. She was the first of her family to go to university and she wanted to show how difficult it can be for someone who isn’t rich and posh to work in law. “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels,” she says. “That’s basically what being in a lower class does to people in the legal profession. You have to keep watching and figuring out how to behave to fit in. Jodie and I went to so many court hearings [for research], and we noticed that one fabulous QC, a Scottish defence lawyer, changes her accent in court. She didn’t even realise she was doing it.”

When Miller was discussing the play with a group of lawyers, one female defence barrister – who, like Tessa, defends men accused of sexual assault – said she would advise her own niece against taking a rape case to court. “She said it in front of a whole room of barristers,” says Miller. “She said, ‘There’s no way she’ll win and it will be traumatising for her because she’ll be cross-examined by someone like me.’ I was like, ‘Wow, that’s full on. That’s terrible, we can’t even rely on the system.’ And the legal process actually reduces the healing, in a way, as it isn’t catering to the pain or the trauma of the victim, and the perpetrator doesn’t ever get told that’s not the way to behave. And the message to women is, ‘We don’t believe you, so you shouldn’t have bothered’.”

One younger audience member who came to see Prima Facie in Sydney told Miller he loved the play, but he hadn’t realised the kind of attack Tessa experiences counts as rape. It’s encounters like this that have convinced Miller that the solution to this crisis cannot just be legal reform – society needs to be educated.

Comer as Tessa, who begins to question everything after she is raped by a colleague (Helen Murray)

“We need to interrogate people’s assumptions,” she says. “Even women have assumptions. Sometimes women have more because if they’re sitting on a jury and they hear a case, they might go, ‘Oh well, that happened to me and I didn’t think it was rape,’ because they don’t want to identify as a rape victim. A woman might also go, ‘Well, I didn’t go out and get drunk like that.’ We should be able to go out, get drunk, party and walk home without being afraid. I don’t know a single woman who’s not scared walking home late at night. You are on alert all the time. If someone walks past you, or is behind you, you’re very vigilant. You’re in fear a lot of the time, even if you don’t like to admit it.”

Many lawyers have been to see Miller’s play. They’ve told her that it was only on watching it that they realised they had just come to accept the flaws in how sexual assault cases are done. She told them, “Hey, I’m not a lawyer any more, it’s your job to fix it.” They listened. The other day, Miller received a text from a judge, saying: “This is now on the agenda.”

“That is beyond anything I could have hoped for,” she says. “A writer’s job is just to show the paradox of being human, to show the gaps and the ways we try to survive with our humanity intact. The rest of it is for the audience to go away, as members of the community, and say, ‘Well, I don’t want to live in a world like that.’ Prima Facie isn’t mine any more. It belongs to the audience.”

‘Prima Facie’ is playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June 2022