It comes around intermittently every few years; a show on Broadway that reminds us why theatre beats every other medium hands down and almost justifies the cost of the tickets. So it was last night, walking down 45th Street in New York past foyers sparse with patrons, to something as close to a mob scene as a person with one eye on their phone for the babysitter can get.
Beneath the marquee, which featured a blown-up image of the actor Jodie Comer, women posed with each other for photos. It was like a revival tent meeting for affluent middle-age lesbians, young women attending alone, a handful of gay men and, I would hazard, approximately 27 enlightened straight ones. “Our people have gone mad for this,” said the friend I was with, and we repaired to our seats feeling vaguely hysterical.
Prima Facie, which has just transferred from London to New York after its opening run in Sydney, isn’t an obvious theatrical blockbuster. There are no songs. There is only one person in it – Comer, who holds the stage for more than 90 minutes with no intermission. It is also about the very un-blockbustery subject of sexual assault and the failure of the legal system adequately to reckon with it.
Comer, who plays a barrister whose assumptions about the law are upended when she is sexually assaulted, has a big following after her role in Killing Eve. And the play, by Suzie Miller, is brilliant. But none of that fully explains it. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house on Tuesday night and the audience was as keyed up as any I’ve seen since Hamilton in 2015, or going back much further to Rent in 1996. The young woman sitting to my right, who told me this was the second time she had seen the play in a week, started weeping, loudly, 30 minutes in and didn’t stop until the standing ovation.
Artworks triggered by or related to the #MeToo movement have appeared in numbers in recent months, and it’s curious to note which of them work and which don’t. I happened to see the film She Said last week, an energy-free adaptation of the book of the same name by the two New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story.
What I loved about the book – a sober, studious account of that groundbreaking reporting that was far superior to Ronan Farrow’s showboating rival effort – killed the movie. On screen, She Said was as flat as a pancake, the two leads, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, desperately trying to resuscitate a script of aching dullness and piety. (The only bright spot was Jennifer Ehle, who should, obviously, be in everything.)
The real #MeToo movie – the one that animated the themes of that movement in a way that didn’t feel like homework or feature women making endless, drippy faces at each other – was Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated Women Talking. We talk about the flattening effect of the term “victim”, and here was an example of how to energise and enliven stories around victimhood without losing all the other markers of what makes us human. In Women Talking, the women are savage, hilarious, absurd – fully real, in other words.
It’s possible to portray reporters and serious subjects this way. I went scuttling back to All the President’s Men, the 1976 Watergate movie, after watching She Said to try to figure out how the film got it so wrong. It is unfair to compare any performer with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford at their height, but still; William Goldman’s script permitted those actors, per the men they were based on, to be diligent reporters but also to be peevish, vain, bombastic and, above all, monstrously ambitious. By contrast the female leads in She Said were presented as virtuous altruists without a competitive bone in their bodies. (Ha – have you met reporters?)
Which brings us back to the character of Tessa Ensler in Prima Facie. In the first half of the play, Comer, whose performance exhausts every superlative, is all swagger, an absolute player who, in the male style, sees the law as a game and whose job it is to take apart victims in the witness box. She is funny and brassy and sure of the space she takes up. The reversal, when it comes, does a very rare thing even in the context of other plausible #MeToo-themed shows: it fully delineates all that has been lost.
In the final third of the show, Comer is almost unrecognisable from the actor she was in earlier parts of the play, her voice, movements, even – and I don’t know how she pulls this off – her face itself seemingly estranged from what they were pre-assault, her energy curdled but still seeking outward expression.
It is this treatment of an entirely commonplace experience with the symbolic weight of dramatic art at its best that, for all the darkness of the play, makes watching it feel like a punch in the air.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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