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.”
