Roslyn Packer Theatre, June 4
8.5/10
This conquering hero of a play returns almost to where it began, and we’re reminded why it has earned such accolades. We witness the consummate craft and searing honesty that won Suzie Miller an Olivier Award in London, after scooping Griffin and Awgie Awards in Australia; that resulted in Prima Facie being translated into some 30 languages, and seen by over one million people.
Miller takes the social fabric in which is interwoven sexual assault and courtroom law, and tears it apart with her fingernails. That she contrived to tell the story via a single character, Tessa Ensler, is ingenious – and what a role for Sheridan Harbridge, in this revisiting of the original 2019 Griffin production, directed by Lee Lewis.
Miller’s masterstroke was to make her protagonist a top-shelf defence barrister; one who delights in the high-stakes game of unpicking evidence during cross-examination. Winning is all; a client’s guilt or innocence, secondary. The law, you see, is supposed to take care of that. Her job is to present the best possible articulation of her client’s version of events.
The system seemed flawless to Tessa, until she was raped; until, 763 days later, she finally enters a courtroom as a witness, before a male judge, male barristers and a mainly male jury.
Now she’s being quizzed, as she has quizzed others, about alcohol intake and previous encounters with the accused. Now she finds that the truth won’t withstand the scrutiny of legal truth: of reasonable doubt in a patriarchy.
A challenge with one-actor plays is to avoid being either static or artificially busy. Lewis and Harbridge hit upon ways of physically enacting Tessa’s internal thoughts that keep us in a constant present tense, even during flashbacks. Harbridge also deploys vocal virtuosity, not just in an elderly judge’s tremulous voice or Tessa’s mum’s tight-lipped monosyllables, but in portraying Tessa’s extreme intelligence. She has her character toy with words, stretching some syllables and pushing extremes of pitch on others.
Harbridge gives Tessa glib confidence when her career is galloping along, clearing obstacles like a steeplechaser: five years of law school – whoosh; 11 years of practicing – whoosh. Then, from the rape scene onwards, she bares her soul, and cleaves the air with her hands in confused desperation. There’s still another level she could dare to attain, lacerating us more, but hers is a massive achievement, supported by the high art of Lewis’s direction and the starkness of Renee Mulder’s set, Trent Suidgeest’s lighting and Paul Charlier’s music and sound design.
Tessa discovers that the system puts the victim on trial, her “guilt” decided by the intricacies of the placement of individual limbs at a given moment. She has to suffer, herself, to come to see the flaw in her beloved legal system: that lived experience is not as neatly packaged as the law would have it, so a lie is made of the truth.
Until June 21.
https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/2026/productions/prima-facie