PRIMA FACIE – PERTH

By VICTORIA LAURIE

July 16 2024

PRIMA FACIE, Black Swan Theatre Company at the Heath Ledger Theatre, July 4-21 2024. Photography by Daniel J Grant

In 2014, Suzie Miller returned to Perth for her first mainstage play Dust, which revolved around the vice-like grip of mining over her birth state. This reviewer was struck by Miller’s ability to recognise phenomena that West Australians seemed to ignore yet were warping every aspect of life in the west – fly-in fly-out workforces, noxious metallic dust in country towns, the boom-and-bust danger that a state’s economy could be tied, hostage-like, to the business of extracting dirt. That remains true today: Miller hadn’t so much tapped into the zeitgeist as anticipated it.

A decade later, Perth has seen two more Miller plays, both widely celebrated for their relevance to the world. Her plays have star billing in the 2024 season of Black Swan State Theatre Company, the company that gave Miller her early break with Dust.

We have seen RBG: Of Many, One, starring Heather Mitchell in her peerless solo performance as the late US judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And now we have Prima Facie, another one-woman piece by Miller that, after its origins at Griffin in Sydney directed by Lee Lewis and starring Sheridan Harbridge, enjoyed starry success (Killing Eve star Jodie Comer) in the West End and on Broadway.

RBG was Sydney Theatre Company’s production imported by Black Swan during a national tour. Prima Facie is different: a new staging by Black Swan’s hugely capable artistic director Kate Champion.

After exhaustive auditions, the solo role went to Perth-raised actor Sophia Forrest. The creative pairing of Champion and Forrest has produced a credible and gripping version of the play about young criminal lawyer Tessa Ensler, who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault until she herself is assaulted.

We learn that Tessa, from a working-class family, is acutely aware that her university mates wear privilege like an elite accessory. Forrest nails these foregrounding scenes, which are interleaved with Tessa’s professional persona as a coltish, uber-confident barrister who boasts about her skill in duplicity. “It’s not emotional for me,” she says breezily, “the game is the law.”

And then – like the revolving stage that gets a regular workout in this production – the game is reversed. A sexual encounter turns violent, penetrative, and painful, and Tessa finds herself on the other end of the law. Like a woman she once observed “fold in two” after her perpetrator walked free, Tessa stands in court feeling “a terrible wrong being done to me.”

Tessa’s emotional state is underlined by Melanie Robinson’s excellent musical soundscape, from piano and cello passages to the ambient sound of a heartbeat and heels clattering on a police station floor. The actual rape is depicted in stop motion video of a face, a smothering hand, an anguished look, a blank stare. “I am there but I am not,” says Tessa.

In this production, there is no elaborate backdrop of legal files or dark-panelled chambers. Every sparse item on stage doubles up – a corporate swivel chair is a taxi, or a couch for office sex. Bruce McKiven’s set design of columns and granite-hued walls evokes the eerie colonnades of power in every CBD. Exquisite lighting design by Peter Young plays with notions of chessboard moves and dark corridors; less subtle are spotlights that multiply to symbolise victims. 

Forrest powerfully inhabits the role of Tessa, holding attention for 100 minutes. The actor also deftly switches between dozens of other characters, from Tessa’s anxious mother clutching her handbag to work-colleague-turned-perpetrator Damien, and even a leering senior police officer who tells Tessa, “You need us now, don’t you?” We learn that Tessa has waited 782 days for her day in court, a time gap depicted by an actual – and slightly distracting - time clock sequence of racing numbers.

Kate Champion’s production does justice to a play about injustice, handling Miller’s script like a time bomb primed with incidents and lines that expose the flaws in sexual assault cases.  The plea for leniency: “he’s a good bloke – what are you doing to him?” The equal fault argument: “I drank too much – we both did.” The “stranger in the night” fiction that obscures the truth – a typical perpetrator is actually the man you’ve worked for, slept with, or trusted as a friend.

In her final scene, Tessa asks the court (and the slightly illuminated theatre auditorium, as if we are the jury) why the cost of being a woman in the world requires that one in three will experience assault.

Since graduation from WAAPA and after occasional screen roles, Forrest gives this first major acting role every scrap of energy and insight. If Tessa’s final speech is slightly uneven in tension (and perhaps too long), it’s understandable at the end of a marathon performance, which was rewarded by a standing ovation from a predominantly female crowd.