THEATRE REVIEW: Prima Facie puts SA’s sexual violence crisis and broken legal system on stage

Suzie Miller’s one-woman play about the terrible complicity between a defective legal system and the scourge of sexual violence is both hugely entertaining and deeply affecting.

For a play so incredibly wordy, Prima Facie is ultimately not theatre you need to follow intellectually. Instead, it is drama you feel, its message a punch to the gut, its argument so thoroughly down to the simple logic of what it means to be human that the weight of it lands in your heart, fills you with a kind of emotional “Aha!” long before any need to unpick its meaning or intellectualise its discourse.

In the days leading up to Women’s Day, a South Africanised version of this powerful Australian play landed at the Baxter in Cape Town and hit like a megaton bomb.

Such is the urgency of what it has to say about the legal conditions that, instead of protecting women, ultimately cause sexual violence to fester.

It also provides a shocking account of the myriad ways in which our so-called justice system subjects female victims of sexual assault to successive rounds of institutionalised abuse. It’s not only about a deficient legal system, though, but also about a society that demonises women who dare speak up about the violence they suffer at the hands of men.

Prima Facie has, since its debut in Sydney in 2019, made waves around the world, been translated into various languages and performed everywhere from Iceland to Nepal.

It’s hard to imagine a more important place for it to have landed than here in South Africa, where the scourge of sexual violence is exacerbated by corrupt, incompetent policing and lacklustre jurisprudence.

In SA, we hear endlessly about gender-based violence, yet nothing ever seems to change. By taking us through courtroom procedure, this play provides clear evidence why: because the system itself is stacked against women, the law overwhelmingly deaf to their suffering, preferring to discredit them while the courts and their legal procedures extend the benefit of the doubt to the perpetrators.

Think these ideas are overstated or obvious? The statistics prove otherwise.

Danica De La Rey Jones, who plays the lawyer at the centre of the story as well as at least two dozen ancillary characters who weave in and out of the narrative, is a revelation, her performance captivating. She’s also quite a lot of fun, at least until her story stops being any fun at all. And at that point it segues into a nightmarish reality that’s vividly, uncompromisingly expressed.

First she gives a lovely, lively, slightly cheeky embodiment of a first-class defence attorney who relishes her courtroom victories above all else.