Suzie Miller releases Prima Facie book following Broadway, West End play's success

This plus this equals that, like a scientific formula. The law can thus be carefully applied to real-life situations to reach the correct - and most just - outcome.

Suzie Miller called that one out pretty early on in her legal career, and today, her forceful interrogation of the laws around sexual assault are making waves around the world.

The award-winning writer, whose play Prima Facie has had sold out runs in Australia, the West End and Broadway, came to the law - her previous career - from a mathematics background, and really couldn't see how the two related.

"It's like a template, and there's all these exceptions to the rules," she says.

"When they started talking about it in mathematical terms, I thought, yeah, but it's all made up. They think it's really like science, but it's not, it's made up! It's totally ad hoc, there're all these exceptions, and all the ways you can construct what, say, a contract is - that's not very mathematical!"

Miller did end up becoming a lawyer, working in human rights and as a children's rights advocate, a job that involved, among other things, listening to children and young people describe incidents of sexual assault and violent rape. Most were too scared or uncertain to even report what had happened to them, much less face a court.

And, knowing what she did about the chances of a guilty verdict for those few cases that did go to court, she could hardly blame them.

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"I thought the consequences of severe sexual assault, even not a severe one, are so dehumanising for young women and women generally," she says.

"We have to really change the paradigm within which we have this conversation. And we have to challenge them more as a very gendered version of how we view this situation occurring because women don't have a voice within it.

"They don't know how to explain how bad it was because they're traumatised. And so you're putting them in a court and you're trying to demolish them, and they're just trying to survive. They're not equipped with all the sort of clever little responses to a high-profile QC ... it's not like it's even in a civil court where they're going to get a payout - they're just asking for the court to recognise a criminal act happened against them."

By the time Miller sat down to write Prima Facie, she was already a successful playwright; her works had been performed at the Sydney Opera House, all over Australia and the UK. It was 2017, she had been out of the law for seven years, and the #MeToo movement was about to be unleashed.

"I thought, there's a play I have to write, that I know I have to write, and I just got to a point where I had that first paragraph about thoroughbreds," she said.

"I originally wrote it over a weekend in one of those sort of frenzied states. This had been sitting in my mind for such a long time and sort of like the loony character, I unzipped and typed it onto the page basically."

The story is about Tessa Ensler, a successful young barrister in London from a working class background, who finds herself defending more than a few sexual assault cases. These are tricky, but she has always stayed close to the boundaries of the law, and tends to win. She tries not to think too hard about the victim - the complainant - on the other side of the courtroom, and what she - it's almost always a she - must be going through.

But then she herself is raped by a colleague - another successful barrister - and finds herself on that very side of the courtroom herself. It's a visceral and searing commentary on the state of the criminal system when it comes to rape and sexual assault, and how laws written by men cannot and should not be applied to a situation that simply won't fit within the confines of a straightforward criminal case.

"When I wrote it, I thought no one's ever going to put this on and no one will ever commission it, so I'm just gonna write it because it's the thing that stuck in my craw from when I was at law school and all the way through all the advocacy I did," she says.

"I actually specifically didn't go to the bar because of the cab rank rule [the rule that a barrister must take on a case within their expertise, no matter how unpalatable], because I knew that as a criminal lawyer, I'd be getting sexual assault cases and I didn't want to run them because I actually didn't have faith in the system of sexual assault."

The play, in its original state, was three hours long and needed some serious editing. Turning it into a novel six years later has been a cakewalk; she's been able to put back all the inner thoughts and extra detail she had to cut from the original script, although she hasn't relished having to edit and re-edit the horrifying central rape scene.

The finished play, a 90-minute one-woman gut punch, starring Sheridan Harcourt, debuted in Sydney at the Griffin Theatre in 2019. It has since won about every award going. It was picked up by a West End producer and, after a two-year COVID delay, debuted in London with Jodie Comer, best known for her role in Killing Eve, in the role of Tessa.

Miller very quickly found herself swept up into the celebrity razzle-dazzle of the West End and then Broadway in New York.

She remembers sitting in the theatre at the first preview in London, breathless as the formidable Comer, in her first theatre role, took to the stage. She was clutching the hand of Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka the musician Self Esteem who wrote the play's score, when the audience rose ecstatically at the end.

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"I didn't expect that to continue to happen every single night on the West End, every single night on Broadway. I mean, it still blows my mind that happened, to be honest. It's incredible. I still can't believe it," she says.

The show has been seen, especially in the US, by a never-ending line-up of mega celebrities, from Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (not on the same night) to Jodie Foster and Dua Lipa. But Miller is not naturally starstruck and, regardless, suffers from prosopagnosia, a condition by which she can't easily recognise faces.

It has, after all, been a long journey for her in her writing career. In the early 2000s, while practising law, she studied playwriting at NIDA and wrote plays for half of the week, practicing law in the other half. When she had the opportunity to develop one of her plays in London, she convinced her husband, Robert Beech-Jones, then an SC, to move there too. For a time, he commuted between Australia and London, their two kids went to school there, and the family barely had any money.

Their marriage survived and so did both of their careers; Beech-Jones has just been appointed to the High Court of Australia, and Miller's most recent work, RBG, about Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, is now touring Australia, and she is promoting the novel of Prima Facie.

Her whirlwind life is all a very far cry from the play's first shows in Sydney, although she knew very early on she was onto something. She recalls one of the first previews, where she and the director had a special showing for women in the legal sector, to see what they thought.

"There were magistrates, judges, QCs, solicitors, politicians, Tanya Plibersek was there, really high-level QCs and judges were there, and there was a Q&A afterwards, with just myself, the actor and the director," she says.

"It was a three-hour conversation with women only, where they disclosed all sorts of sexual assault as barristers. They said - this is so interesting to me - once you've invested all that time at law school, all that time as a solicitor before you go to the bar, all that time as a barrister, all that money, all that time away from your children ... you know that if you actually report someone that there'll be a quiet ripple through the community, where they'll go, Oh, God, you can't trust her.

"So in a way, they have so much to lose that even though they're lawyers, they can't report it."

Since the play's record-breaking run here, in the UK and on Broadway, it has scored Best New Play at the Olivier Awards, with Comer named best actress. Queues have formed around the block, and Miller is baffled when people ask for her autograph.

But it's the professional regard the play has been afforded that speaks volumes to her. A High Court judge responsible for drafting jury directions across the country contacted Miller after seeing the play.

"She said, 'After I saw Prima Facie, I was so confronted by it that I went home and redrafted the directions to the jury on rape and sexual assault to talk about how a woman can freeze and that doesn't mean they're consenting'," she says.

"When I put down the phone, I thought that five-minute conversation might be the most important five minutes of change I've ever effected in my whole life."

Another judge from Northern Ireland told her she now made every single judge in her country watch the National Theatre's filmed version of Jodie Comer performing the play - a recording that, has incidentally, been the theatre's highest-grossing streamed version of the play. And a senior member of the North Yorkshire Police recently made 3000 police officers watch the play onscreen as well.

But one of the most memorable moments came early on, in that Q&A session with all the women lawyers in Sydney.

Sitting right at the front, in a bright suit and severe haircut, was one of the country's most prominent criminal barristers, best known for defending sexual assault cases. She raised her hand, and Miller's heart sank.

"I said, 'Oh be kind! Actually I do believe in innocent until proven guilty, just so you know!'

"And she said, 'I'd just like to say that I do this for a living ... every day of my life I do defence for a sexual assault matter.

"I'm in the middle of one now, and if it was my niece or my goddaughter that came to me and said they'd been sexually assaulted, I'd say never take it to court because you'll have someone like me that would destroy you, and you'll never get a conviction'.

"And then she said, 'But what I would do is I get one of my other clients to go and break the guy's legs'."

A broken system indeed.

Suzie Miller will be in conversation with Sally Pryor on October 4, 6pm at The Street Theatre. Bookings essential: thestreet.org.au

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