Australian playwright Suzie Miller’s hard-hitting one-woman play, Prima Facie, is about the patriarchal hold of the law around rape. It arrived in Johannesburg to a city in a heightened state.
The South African premiere of the production (produced by How Now Brown Cow), which started with a run at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre in August, opened at the Market Theatre on the day of the funeral of runner Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, one of the 11 women killed in a spree of femicide in Ekurhuleni.
It’s a play of the times. Its 2022 London production in the West End won two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Play and Best Actress for Jodie Comer, who subsequently won a Tony Award for the same role on Broadway in New York in 2023.
The film adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo, will have its theatrical release in November 2026 in the UK and Ireland; and in January 2027 in Australia.
The play’s landing in Johannesburg is particularly urgent and charged.
Women are being sexually assaulted and killed. Rape is “a South African nightmare”, to quote Pumla Dineo Gqola’s book title; with alarming statistics, low case reports and low convictions.
The writing of this review coincided with news of the arrest of senior South African Police Service officer Shadrack Sibiya on several charges including the alleged grooming of a 16-year-old, the rape of an 18-year-old and human trafficking.
Joburg is also the site of the Jacob Zuma rape trial for which Zuma was acquitted in 2006 after the Johannesburg High Court, accepted his claim that the rape was consensual.
The high-profile case inspired an influx of various writings
(notably Mmatshilo Motsei’s The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflection on the Rape Trial of Jacob Zuma), protest and creative interrogation spanning poetry and contemporary dance.
Prima Facie steps into this historical context and zeitgeist and turns the spotlight on the law.
While the title hints at the workings of the legal system, the play is a visceral experience more than an intellectual undertaking.
Danica De La Rey Jones is Tessa Ensler, a rising barrister who de-fends men accused of sexual assault and wins.
She believes in the justice system until she is sexually assaulted and questions everything she came to love about the law.
De La Rey Jones is a beast of a performer who commands the room for a full 90 minutes in a gripping fashion. She embodies the character with considered physicality and rawness, riding the waves of the play’s emotive arcs — explosive, tender and deeply moving at the right moments.
Her brilliance also shone in her work in James Ngcobo’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s choreo-poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, in 2024.
Prima Facie starts off entertaining before getting to the heart of the matter. Laughs from the audience in the beginning can be warranted to the script’s sense of humour but the silence in the middle of the play and the slight sniffling (possibly from crying) in the end ring of its gravitas.
Director Neil Coppen is adept at holding space for women characters. He wove nuanced magical realism in Isidlamlilo with Mpume Mthombeni. Here he employs a subtlety that accentuates the power of De La Rey Jones’s work.
Careful work went into adapting the script for local resonance. And for Joburg dwellers, even the word “Uber” lands differently now given how Uber drivers have been linked to sexual assault cases in the city.
What the play questions revolves around the victim-blaming in cross-examinations of complainants in rape cases. This is linked to the rape myths normalised in patriarchal societies like South Africa that Gqola lists in her book (Rape: A South African Nightmare). Some of them have to do with what constitutes rape and what constitutes a rape victim.
The danger of rape myths, Gqola says, is how they embolden perpetrators, re-traumatise victims and survivors and keep rape culture alive.
In her article, Rape Myths and the Language of the Law, lecturer at the School of Law at the University of KwaZulu- Natal Rorisang Matlala, expands on Gqola’s writing by focusing on rape myths around the complexities of consent (including consent in romantic relationships) and how they inform judicial language.
Matlala makes a case for the “need to reconcile judicial language with feminist legal thinking in the adjudication of sexual violence” for a shift towards inclusive and survivor-centred language in the courtroom.
Matlala and Gqola’s writings hint at a need for overall education and judicial training in the legal system. The play calls for change.
Its transformative power lies in who it can attract.
In the press run for the Prima Facie film’s premier at the Toronto International Film Festival, Miller shared how during the play’s early run in London’s West End she was contacted by a London judge who’d seen the play. The woman judge went on to redraft the statement read to the jury before deliberation on rape cases using language from the play.
Prima Facie is a must-see powerful performance. It’s an important play for a country like ours which struggles with rape and femicide.
Here’s hoping it attracts those with the power to make a change.
Catch the last shows of Prima Facie at the Market Theatre until October 11.