You would never know that Jodie Comer is making her stage debut in Suzie Miller’s harrowing one-person play Prima Facie. The thirty-year-old British actress has rocketed to fame in recent years, thanks in large part to her award-winning turn as a ruthless assassin in the international hit television series Killing Eve. But while many film and television stars prove underwhelming on stage, Comer instantly affirms herself as a top-rank theater performer with this dynamic star turn in which she absolutely commands attention for 100 uninterrupted minutes. Already the recipient of the Olivier Award for the play’s London run, she should repeat that success when the Tonys are handed out in June.
Comer plays Tessa, a woman from a working-class background who has become a successful defense barrister specializing in criminal cases involving sexual assault. At the play’s beginning, she’s standing on top of a table in an office lined with impossibly high shelves containing case files, giddily regaling us with an account of her latest success in the courtroom. For her, the law is simply a winning or losing proposition. “Today, I was a winner,” she crows. “Today, I came first.”
Comer’s opening speech, accompanied by a percussive score courtesy of composer Rebecca Lucy Taylor (better known as Self Esteem), is delivered at such a fever pitch that it feels like a virtuoso jazz solo. You think that the actress couldn’t possibly sustain that level of intensity for the rest of the evening. But she does, infusing the often-stodgy monologue form with a relentless physicality that proves compelling from first minute to last. Even more miraculously, she neither wears out the audience’s energy nor her own.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The play takes a significantly darker turn when Tessa describes her camaraderie with a colleague, Julian, that eventually results in a sexual encounter while they’re working late at the office one night. She’s not averse to pursuing the relationship, and the pair have a real date that winds up with them at her apartment. But she’s had too much to drink and becomes violently ill, during which he takes the opportunity to forcibly have sex with her despite her vigorous protests. Immediately, Tessa is thrust into the criminal justice system, only this time as a victim. Actually, not so immediately, as illustrated by a video display rattling off the number of days from when she first reported the crime to when Julian’s trial begins: 782, to be exact.
The Tessa that we see during the process of being interrogated by a less than sympathetic police officer — after learning she’s a defense barrister, he taunts, “Now you need us, though, don’t you?” — and enduring the trial is a very different one from before. Comer heartbreakingly portrays her character’s crumbling into despair in a visceral manner; when we see Tessa during a dramatic staging effect, it’s like watching an animal caught in a trap.
The play doesn’t quite live up to Comer’s mastery. While it certainly feels vitally relevant, as reinforced by the pamphlet about the epidemic of sexual assault that is included in the program, it also feels schematic and predictable at times. There’s little doubt from the beginning that Tessa is headed for a fall, but the playwright doesn’t make her transition particularly revelatory.
Nonetheless, Prima Facie proves a shattering evening, masterfully staged by Justin Martin and making superb use of sound, lighting and projection effects to inject theatrical energy into the proceedings. Not that any of it was necessary with such a dynamic performance at its center.
