By BRUCE DENNILL
Prima Facie / Directed by Neil Coppen / Barney Simon Theatre, Market Theatre, Newtown, Johannesburg
Suzie Miller’s play about law and sexual violence lands in South Africa at a sickeningly apposite time, with multiple bodies of murdered women having turned up in the east of Johannesburg in recent weeks. Even more disturbing, though, is that the narrative has more or less never not applied – in any country. Miller is an Australian, and the play has enjoyed success there, on the West End and on Broadway, and has also been translated into 25 languages: it is tragically appropriate wherever it is staged.
For the piece’s South African debut, How Now Brown Cow Productions (CEO, producer, writer and actress Julie-Anne McDowell has always supported material offering social commentary) drafted highly-regarded director Neil Coppen, himself an artist dedicated to activism through Empatheatre (he is one of three company co-directors), with the superb Isitha Sabantu, examining ecological and environmental concerns, running at the Market Theatre in early 2026. Their combined drive to focus and distil this material, plus what turns out to be the utterly perfect casting of Danica De La Rey Jones, makes this Johannesburg run of Prima Facie both entertaining and devastating.
As a one-woman play being staged in the compact Barney Simon Theatre, the physical scope of this piece is not huge, but a clever, multi-faceted set by Patrick Curtis; defined, dramatic lighting by Tina Le Roux and, in particular, a Charl-Johan Lingenfelder sound design that is by turns sonically gut-punching and subtly texture-enriching, create a powerful, intricate platform on which the central performance can play out.
The final and largest part of that platform is Miller’s script, which has to be weighty to properly honour its topic. For the first section, that gravity is balanced with pacey, whip-smart soliloquies and a character with the eye-twinkling cockiness that comes with being young, gifted, believing whole-heartedly in the work she does and enjoying the first major flush of success. Knowing the play’s theme going in means that further complexity is not unexpected, with protagonist Tessa juggling a fling with a coworker with her professional life, and then enduring a life-shattering experience that sees her experiencing the law she has dedicated her career to from the other side – and being broken anew by that encounter.
There is a scene, in all the fizzing cut and thrust of the bulk of the play, that feels unlikely from a plot perspective. It confronts the unforgiveable shortfall of the law (anywhere in the world) when it comes to testing the credibility of a woman’s story in a sexual violence case using orthodox legal language rather than flashy writer imaginings and is delivered straight from actor to audience, inviting, perhaps, labels including “preachy” and “didactic” – generally thrown into social media comment sections as negatives. As such, it does interrupt the dramatic flow of the piece in a way that no other similarly potent passage has to that point.
But here’s the thing: it needs to. There is room to challenge a societal failing through allegory and metaphor and fable, but when rape and gender-based violence statistics are as high as they are and governments seem to believe that statements doing nothing more than calling on offenders to not rape are actual policies, something more eloquently informed and confrontational without being belligerent may actually get through to those who hear it.
Holding all of this together – the story’s strata of energy, wit, incisiveness and later the confusion, pain and grief – is Jones, in what may turn out to be a performance that changes both her life and the lives of several audience members (those who have been through something similar to Tessa or those whose naivety about the subject matter is torn to shreds by the play). Jones is magnetically, stratospherically good, pressed into hitting as many marks and delivering as many dense, terse monologues as the entire cast of an Aaron Sorkin drama. Her courageous commitment to and precision in handling every aspect of the role is astonishing, from being her own stagehand in the manipulation of various props to enthusiastic nightclub dancing to switching accents and physical tics as she depicts the friends, family and foes in Tessa’s life. The actress is the sole focus of attention for a little over two hours in a show that refuses to shy away from society’s most appalling inadequacies and what she delivers is never less than completely engrossing. It’s an extraordinary achievement that looks like it hollows her out by the end, and any audience member with a scrap of empathy will feel similarly raw.
This performance should win every award for which it qualifies – it elevates every other aspect of the play – but trophies will be far less of a reward than its potential effect on those who see it and are inspired to consider and change their own attitudes towards sexual violence and the emotional trauma that follows the physical assault. entertaining
Brilliant, gripping theatre with a viscerally powerful message. See it.