After the opening night of the hit play Prima Facie in London in 2022, a young female producer came up to playwright Suzie Miller and said, “Loved the play. I’m one in three,” a line from the script referring to the number of women who are sexually assaulted in the UK. “She didn’t have to say ‘I was raped,’” Miller recalls. “It was this moment where I thought, ‘Oh, you can say that now.’”
“The hardest thing is for a woman to say ‘I was raped,’” adds Jodie Comer, whose solo performance as the young defence lawyer forced to confront the failings of the legal system after she herself is sexually assaulted made the play a sensation. “Women struggle with those words. To see people come and voice ‘This happened to me’ is enormous.” This month Miller publishes a novelised version of the play, also called Prima Facie: it is dedicated to “all the women who comprise the ‘one in three’.”
