Jodie Comer’s bold and brilliant West End debut
Theatre Prima Facie Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 ★★★★
West End debuts don’t come much more astonishing than this solo tour de force by Jodie Comer. In Prima Facie, she plays a London criminal barrister complacently expert in sexual assault cases, who unravels after she’s raped by a work colleague, and during the pitiless ensuing trial. Her performance, running a full-pelt 100 minutes, propels her into the front rank of stage stars.
It has to be said that the 29-yearold Liverpudlian has seemed incapable of putting a foot wrong when it comes to career moves. Her award-winning, chameleonic turn as the assassin Villanelle in the freshly concluded BBC thriller series Killing
Eve was the making of her, but also the making of it.
Television keeps clamouring for more of her – and she has delivered in spades. The film world is increasingly staking a claim to her versatility too. Strikingly, a timetable clash saw her turn down Napoleon, directed by Ridley Scott – with whom she worked on The Last Duel – to undertake Suzie Miller’s monologue at the Harold Pinter. Clearly, she has been champing at the bit to tread the boards – she made her debut in Scarborough as a teen in a family drama in 2010.
But Prima Facie is evidently a passion project. Informed by its Australian author’s experiences as a lawyer, and first seen in Sydney in 2019, it crosses continents in its damning portrait of justice-denied women. In interviews, Comer, who consulted lawyers for research, has pointed out its relevance to the UK.
If there’s an issue with the play it’s that in its final epilogue, it bluntly avows that need for systemic change, effectively demanding our indignation, whereas that concern bubbles up quite naturally in response to what we witness. Though the presentation of what happens to Comer’s thirtysomething character – Tessa
Ensler – unambiguously shows her as a rape victim, Miller’s slant, and Comer’s portrayal, still teem with rich nuance, testing sympathies.
At the outset, her bewigged and begowned Tessa, prowling an imposing set by Miriam Buether dominated by stacks of folders, is the model of insouciance and even Villanelle-ish insolence. We knew that Comer had terrific facial expressiveness, and vocal facility, but the revelation is her physicality. She embodies the swaggering work hard/ play hard culture of legal high-flyers.
There’s surprising comic value as this lone figure – handily reconceived in the script’s English tweaks as Liverpudlian, and of working-class background, both like Comer – conspiratorially anatomises the business of a cross-examination. Every statement seems to carry a supple gesture – she does mock-limbering up motions as she describes moving in for the kill to trash a witness. She affects unconcern at the thought that a male perpetrator has got away with it – “a good lawyer just tells the best version of their client’s story,” she shrugs.
You wonder how she will sustain the vigorous pace, as she leaps on and off chambers-style heavy tables – a pounding soundtrack adding to the palpitating urgency – and populates the stage around her, often with different men – her bruiser brother, a condescended-to policeman, the “gentle, sheepish” barrister Jules, who’s the fling that goes appallingly wrong on a second drunken date.
The switch happens with such force that it’s like a punch to the guts. One moment, we’re enjoying her imitation of retching into a toilet-bowl, the next she’s signalling a terrible immobility as her putatively concerned partner takes advantage of her inebriated condition. Formerly glowing, it’s as if the colour drains from Comer’s face; she details the constriction and panic that sets in. She seems to shrink into vulnerability; Justin Martin’s slick production has her hunched in a green evening dress and miserably drenched in a downpour.
Comer’s corporeal finesse acquires a subtextual profundity as the onus shifts on Tessa to indicate precisely the physical sequence of events, no credence given to adamant assertion, no accommodation made to confusion. It’s her turn to be crossexamined: her voice trembles, face tearfully crumples.
I’d have liked more detail about her friends and family; there’s a gap caused by a large jump in time between the attack and the court hearing. But in the face of Comer’s triumphant leap into the live acting arena, I was mainly left wanting to see her on stage more; she’s in her element, and can work wonders.
Until June 18. Tickets: 0333 009 6690; primafacieplay.com; returns only, but will be broadcast as part of NT Live from July 22; primafacie.ntlive.com