Prima Facie review: An extraordinary Jodie Comer exposes our broken legal system in a striking if tidy drama

In her West End debut, the ‘Killing Eve’ star is steely, agile and remarkable

Jodie Comer in ‘Prima Facie’ (Helen Murray)

It’s hard to believe that Prima Facie marks Jodie Comer’s West End debut, given the command the Bafta winner has over her audience from the moment she strides onstage. Comer doesn’t drop the ball for a second of the play’s 100 charged minutes. She plays Tessa, a defence barrister who specialises in defending accused rapists. Her life, ethics, and belief in the system she’s spent her entire career upholding come crashing down when a fellow lawyer rapes her.

Suzie Miller’s text is pacy and punchy. A lawyer turned playwright, she excels at the rapid, ruthless courtroom scenes, where certainties can be massaged and manipulated into confusion. Comer shines on both sides of the dock. As the bullish, swaggering lawyer at the play’s start – “a thoroughbred”, as she puts it – Tessa relishes exploiting every chink in her opponent’s armour. “It’s not emotional for me,” she states. “It’s a game.”

Tessa luxuriates in the performance of the court. She’s just as at home at the bar as she is taking shots and twerking with her colleagues. Conversely, when Tessa decides to take her rapist to court and becomes the witness – and is cross-examined by a patronising, vicious QC – Comer is alternately steely and impassioned, noble and embarrassed, flustered and composed. It’s a remarkably agile performance.

The production itself is full of striking elements: musical compositions by Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka pop star Self Esteem) throb and hum like a pulsing vein, and Miriam Buether’s set design initially places Tessa in a vast library, surrounded by legal documents. The walls around her then fall away, leaving her stranded in an inky void. Perhaps it’s a mite too emphatic, but it’s potent nonetheless.

Where Prima Facie falters, unfortunately, is in Miller’s writing. She has a tendency to lean on broad observational comedy, but jokes about going to Pret and a posh guy called Benedict are far too easy, and more crucially, not funny. The supporting characters, from Tessa’s dependable mother to her actor best friend, are almost totally two-dimensional. They function as props for Tessa and the plot rather than anything more substantial.

Tessa’s backstory is more detailed, but still lightly sketched. But as a working-class girl who fights her way into a law degree at Cambridge alongside her arrogant public-school classmates, Comer imbues the bare bones of what she’s given with assurance, papering over the text’s weaker moments. Justin Martin’s stylish direction also finds telling details in small choices, like how Tessa’s Liverpudlian accent switches into smooth RP vowels when she’s speaking in court.

Overall, Prima Facie is a play concerned with messiness. It’s about how sexual assault cases are almost impossible to win in a court of law, and how so-called legal truths are unable – and indeed, were never built – to hold the complexities and inherent incoherence of actual fact. The argument the play gestures towards is that the legal system we have in place is entirely broken, though whether it drills down enough into this idea is another matter.

Indeed, it often hankers for tidiness in a way that undercuts its thematic aims: it’s in the way the music can swell at certain emotional points, feeling somewhat overwrought, and it’s in Tessa’s barnstorming speech at the play’s close, which, while rousing, feels far too Hollywood in its neatness. Comer’s performance is extraordinary, though, and Prima Facie is worth seeing for that alone.

‘Prima Facie’ runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June