WHEN JUSTICE MATTERS
Suzie Miller left a high-profile career as a defence lawyer to become a playwright. Now her play Prima Facie, a searing indictment on sexual assault cases in the law, is taking the world by storm
Suzie Miller had a decision to make. It was 2009, and after a stellar career as a criminal defence and human rights lawyer, she was asked to serve as a magistrate in NSW. She had also been writing plays in her spare time and a residency at London’s National Theatre was on the table as well. “Of course, the pay difference was astonishing,” Miller laughs as she recalls the choice.
“But it was so clear to me that it was a wonderful moment to walk away from law because I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”
A decade later, Miller sat on stage at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, surrounded by women who were once her professional peers. Judges, barristers, QCs, solicitors, policy experts – they had all come to see Prima Facie, the story that had been in her head since law school.
“I felt uncomfortable at times with some of the things that were said in class, or the way that we looked at cases, or the way people laughed at fact scenarios,” she remembers.
“Every time I talked to lawyers about it, people became really defensive when I was younger. I didn’t really have the articulation but I just knew something was amiss.”
Unlike most writers, Miller now best sums up that feeling with numbers.
One in three women experiences sexual assault.
Of those, only one in 10 will go to the police.
And of those, only 1.3 per cent will see their perpetrators convicted. To
Miller, maths has much in common with theatre.
“It takes a really complex concept and makes it as elegant and as short as possible,” she says.
At the Griffin Theatre, she realised that was what she had achieved with Prima
Facie, the story of a lawyer named Tessa who defends men accused of sexual assault, until she is assaulted herself.
As a female QC told her during a three-hour panel discussion after that night’s performance: “I defend sexual assault cases every day … and if it was my goddaughter or my niece who came to me and said they had been
sexually assaulted, I would never encourage them to go through the system.”
“Suddenly audiences can relate because they empathise with the character,” Miller says. “It really hit a nerve.”
Last year, after rave reviews in Sydney and Melbourne, Prima Facie took London by storm. Miller’s West End debut – with Killing Eve star Jodie Comer playing Tessa – is now nominated for five prestigious Olivier Awards including best new play and best actress.
Next month, the one-woman play will open on Broadway, and over the next two years, it will be translated into 30 languages and appear in theatres worldwide. Miller is also finalising a film adaptation and a novel.
“This was unexpected on some level, but I guess on another level it’s what I was always hoping to work towards,” she says. “For that knot I was trying to untangle, that knot is now something that the community is trying to untangle, and for that I’m so grateful.”
Miller struggled with that knot for years as she
navigated both sides of the legal system.
Working in a human rights legal centre for youths in Sydney, she would take half a dozen statements about sexual assault every week from victims seeking compensation. Women told her of “the most traumatic date rapes and the most difficult cases of child sexual abuse”. But most were too embarrassed or ashamed to consider involving the police.
“You could see that any of them who did take it to the police, it either didn’t go to the next step, or it did and they lost,” Miller recalls.
“There was no doubt in my mind that they were not exaggerating – they actually didn’t even want to tell me.”
It rocked her remaining confidence in the way the system handled those rare cases which did make it to court.
Defence lawyers would claim victims were seeking revenge or experiencing regret about sexual experiences they suggested were perhaps uncomfortable but not illegal, arguments that the women she was trying to help had already internalised.
“Once I starting seeing how unfair the system was, I couldn’t do sexual assault cases in defence,” Miller says.
“As a lawyer, you really have to trust the system in order to go right to the edge of that line … I suddenly lost faith that that line was reasonable.”
She is reassured now by the debate Prima Facie has sparked among her former colleagues, both in Australia and overseas. But Miller – who is married to NSW Supreme Court judge Robert Beech-Jones – says these problems are not just for lawyers to solve.
“Decisions are made by juries … It’s not enough just to change the law, because these rape myths, these ideas of regret are embedded in the community,” she says.
The play, informed by Miller’s extensive research, challenges misconceptions about who is usually responsible for sexual assaults (“It’s not someone who has jumped out from a bush and scared them, it’s actually someone they’ve started to engage with”) and how victims respond (“There’s fight or flight, but there’s also freeze”).
It also confronts the question of consent, both on the stage and through an associated education program run by volunteer lawyers in schools. Miller says affirmative consent laws – implemented in NSW and Victoria – are an important step forward for women and men.
“I’ve got a daughter and a son, and you don’t want your son to be in a situation where they’ve said, ‘I just assumed they were consenting’,” she says.
“The stakes are really high for them as well … We need to educate our boys because it’s really important that it’s not an assumption and it’s a conversation.”
It’s really humbling to see that something you’ve made up in a dark study while everyone else is going out for dinner … that it’s really worth it
In London and now New York, these
conversations are started on stage by Jodie Comer in what is her first theatre production since she was a teenager. Miller was thrown when Comer was suggested to play Tessa, having been so convinced by her portrayal of the assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve that she thought she was Russian. Comer’s natural accent, however, is a Scouse twang from working-class Liverpool. Miller’s upbringing in a “strong, heady Catholic family” in Melbourne’s inner-city St Kilda was similarly humble. She was the first in her family to attend university, a formative experience that helped animate the character Comer is now playing to award-winning acclaim.
“When I went out in the world, there was no real framing for me,” Miller says.
“Like Tessa, I learned how to be in that world without humiliating myself.”
It is a memory Miller shares as she points out that Prima Facie is no overnight success. “I’ve been really dedicated for 20 years working towards this,” she says, having overcome what she describes as a “very dark period” for female playwrights in Australia.
“I was a lawyer and a woman and I thought that was hard,” Miller says. “When it came to theatre, people just assumed that if the stories had a female focus, they weren’t interesting for audiences. And ironically, most of the audiences were women.”
She is pleased the theatre industry is now on the right track. Having walked away from the law, Miller hopes Prima Facie will help take the legal system further along the same path.
“It’s really humbling to see that something you’ve made up in a dark study while everyone else is going out for dinner … that it’s really worth it, that people really hear it,” Miller says.