When it comes to sexual assault and the law, a lot has happened since Suzie Miller debuted her one-woman “rape play” (her words).
Prima Facie, about a sexual assault defence-barrister-turned-complainant who tries to get justice for her own rape, opened at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company in 2019. Since then, in Australia alone, we’ve witnessed the fallout from high-profile allegations involving the then attorney general Christian Porter, the former parliamentary aide Bruce Lehmann and the actor Geoffrey Rush (all of whom denied the allegations and none of whom were convicted).
Not much has happened to make Miller’s text less relevant and, although the play has sparked a review of consent law in the UK, it’s unlikely that there has been any material change to the statistics that the play hammers home. Depending on the jurisdiction, it’s estimated that between one in five and one in three women have been sexually assaulted; that only one in 10 rapes are reported to police. Of the ones that make it to trial, the conviction rate is less than 2%.
Against this backdrop, Prima Facie has thrived: it has been remounted and toured nationally, and adapted for the West End and Broadway (starring Jodie Comer) – which was then filmed and released in cinemas internationally. The play has sold out seasons, won Olivier and Tony awards, and been produced in different countries and languages.
Clearly there is a big audience for this kind of story – and it’s about to get bigger. A film version, penned by Miller and starring Cynthia Erivo, is on the way. In the meantime, we have this novelisation, which follows in the footsteps of Australian stage-to-page adaptations The Drover’s Wife, by Leah Purcell, and The Visitors, by Jane Harrison.
Stage-to-screen adaptations are almost as old as cinema itself, but novelising a play poses a distinctive challenge: rather than paring back your text, you have to expand it, padding out plot and psychology. The risk is that the added material feels schematic or redundant. Sometimes, less is more.
Prima Facie is a great play: it’s a tight, taut 100 minutes on stage, in which every beat counts, and it’s an exceptionally effective marriage of content and form. The narrative follows the young “thoroughbred” defence barrister Tessa Ensler through the before, during and after of being raped by a friend and colleague. By channelling the narrative through this single character and performer, Miller (formerly a lawyer herself) not only gives the audience a taste of the “tricks of the trade” that barristers use to create compelling stories but demonstrates the seductiveness of these performances.
The play cannily – and devastatingly – puts each audience member in the position of judge, juror, complainant and bystander, and approximates an inside view of how flawed the legal system is when it comes to adjudicating sexual assault. Together in the audience, we are a microcosm of the society that is complicit in this dysfunction. (Crucially, it also suggests how we might begin to level the playing field by moving to an “affirmative consent” model.)
As a novel, Prima Facie jettisons these advantages. So what does it gain?
Miller expands her protagonist’s backstory and the cast of ancillary characters. As in the play, we first encounter Tessa in court doing what she does best: demolishing a witness in her cross-examination.
Tessa is a gun when it comes to getting men accused of sexual assault off the hook. She’s also an outsider turned insider: a working-class woman who has learned how to rumble in the ruling class’s jungle.
In the book, Miller elaborates on Tessa’s upbringing and family, and the rarefied social milieu of the bar. Changing the setting to the UK automatically amps up the class dynamics that pervade the common law system Australia inherited. In flashbacks to Tessa’s law school years, we get a more complete sense of not only her outsider identity but also of how high the professional stakes are for her. You understand her ideological passion for criminal defence, and that there are no second chances or safety nets if she puts a foot wrong.
So far so good, because the impact of Miller’s narrative sits squarely in the premise that if Tessa cannot succeed as a complainant, then who on earth can?
But the novel feels heavy-handed in its treatment of gender roles and dynamics, as plot points and characters (some new, some expanded) are deployed to illustrate the different shades of toxic and benign masculinity and femininity. Tessa gets a niece, for example, who is born after the assault and becomes symbolic of Tessa’s youthful self and the next generation of women she feels a duty of care towards.
Structurally, the novel follows the play – it’s a well-crafted narrative – but with the added padding, the experience is less electric. More often, you can feel the cogs turning, gears grinding. Points (about matters of law, but also about Tessa’s psychology and motivations) are made, underscored, and then made again; parallels feel overdrawn (an office cleaner that reminds Tessa of her mother; Tessa’s cross-examination of a sexual assault complainant, which is echoed later when she herself is the complainant). The prose is occasionally awkward and confusing, adding to a nagging sense that the novel could have done with a final finesse.
Still: in its novelised form, Miller’s story remains a compelling exposé of a broken system that once seen, we cannot – should not – unsee, and a call to action for changing it.
Prima Facie by Suzie Miller is out now through Pan Macmillan
