PRIMA FACIE ★★★★
Griffin Theatre,May 23
To get a rape conviction,the victim needs to be a one-legged nun.
That was a lawyer’s startling assessment when,as a cub court reporter,I covered my first rape trial. For several days,I’d seen a young woman’s credibility shredded before the accused walked free.
More than 30 years on,that hard-bitten lawyer’s words came back to me watching playwright Suzie Miller’s indictment of the legal system. For depressingly little has changed. The scales of justice remain weighted against women.
And not just in criminal cases. With the Geoffrey Rush defamation case back in the news hours before this play opened,the spotlight is again on how women who speak up – however reluctantly – are treated.
The legal system reflects and reinforces society’s attitudes. And,in that respect,there is little encouragement in a week in which a survey found a third of young men believed many women who claim to have been raped had consensual sex but later had regrets.
The centre of this one-woman play,which won the 2018 Griffin Award,does not initially appear like someone who will question the system. Indeed no one has benefited from it more.
Tessa reckons she’s a thoroughbred. She’s a criminal barrister with a string of impressive wins under her horsehair wig. In a business suit as taut as her legal mind,she’s brash,sassy and she knows how to play by the rules.
She is also funny as she sends up her private school colleagues who fill the upper echelons of the legal profession. But she has not,in fact,come from thoroughbred stock,but the hardscrabble suburbs,with a lone battler mother and a dropkick violent older brother.