Suzie Miller’s 2022 play Prima Facie was one of those rare theatre events that garner headlines beyond the arts pages. A 90-minute, one-woman tour de force performed by Jodie Comer in her first major stage role, it was a hit in the West End and on Broadway, won multiple awards, and has prompted efforts within the legal profession to address the issues raised by the story. Now Miller, a former lawyer, has expanded the drama into novel form, with mixed results.
Prima Facie is a story of two halves, narrated in a breathless, first-person present tense by Tessa Ensler, an ambitious barrister in her early 30s who has risen from a Luton council estate via Cambridge to a prestigious London chambers.
Tessa is making a name for herself in criminal defence, particularly in cases of sexual assault. When less enlightened female friends ask how she can defend a man who may have raped someone, she tells them loftily: “I just play within the rules and do the best I can. If we all play by the rules, then justice will be done.”
Her touching faith in the equalising power of the law, which she repeats often in the first part, appears more than a little naive alongside her acute awareness of the gulf between her life and those of her colleagues who were born to privilege; but it’s firmly established as the code she lives by, and the one that will therefore be tested to breaking point by the pivotal event of the story.
A date with an attractive older colleague, Julian, ends badly when Tessa invites him back to hers. When she decides to go to the police the morning after, she believes that her training has prepared her for everything the system can throw at her. Instead, 782 days later, she learns that being on the witness stand is a very different business. “I answer out loud, but in my head I’m cross-examining myself. Using my own defence skills to doubt my very own narrative… Finding fault in my version of events. Blaming myself. Trapped again and again and again.”
It’s not unusual, whenever a successful novel is adapted for stage or screen, to hear fans of the original complain that much of the story’s complexity is lost in the abridging, but the same problem can occur in reverse. The economy and tautness that made Miller’s play so compelling is missing in this new iteration. Instead, the first part of the novel is padded out with flashbacks to Tessa’s childhood and university days, all of which slow down the momentum towards the assault and the more dynamic courtroom drama that follows.
The catastrophically low conviction rate for sexual assault (1.3%) is, as the novel makes clear, the result of a legal framework that is not designed to accommodate the doubts and ambiguities that attend victims’ experiences. “The law of sexual assault spins on the wrong axis,” Tessa tells the court in her impassioned climactic speech. Prima Facie foregrounds these ambiguities in ways that prick the reader’s conscience uncomfortably – Miller is especially good on the ways in which other women can dismiss or diminish a victim in order to avoid confronting their own experience.
The Guardian review of the play said: “Comer’s performance compensates for the clompy-footed parts of Miller’s script”, and this pinpoints neatly the problem with the novel: without the actor’s charisma to mediate, the writing can too often feel flat. But Prima Facie has already had a powerful impact outside the theatre, with copies of the original script included in training for new judges. If the novelisation gives it a greater reach, that can only be to the good; these are stories that need to be heard.
• Prima Facie by Suzie Miller is published by Cornerstone (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
