BOOKS


Débuts of 2024: Vol 2 Author Interview: Suzie Miller


but I remember who did it and what happened…’”


Suzie Miller Prima Facie


F


resh from its spectacular success in London’s West End and on Broadway in New York,


playwright Suzie Miller has adapted her award-winning one-woman legal drama “Prima Facie” into a gripping debut novel. On stage, it played to sell- out audiences and scooped Miller the Olivier award for best new play, with Jodie Comer named best actress for her portrayal of barrister Tessa Ensler at both the Olivier and Tony Awards. Prima Facie (pronounced fay-see) unfolds from the perspective of Tessa, a hot-shot criminal defence barrister, among the brightest stars at


36 23rd February 2024


her male-dominated London chambers, having risen from a Luton council estate. Brilliant, tenacious and quick-thinking in court, she relishes the challenge of defending a case, believing her job is to tell a story and then the jury will decide on the truth. But when a date with a colleague goes very wrong, Tessa finds herself on the other side of the courtroom in a rape case, her faith in the legal system shaken to its core. When Miller speaks to me


via video call from her home in Sydney, brimming with enthusiasm despite the lateness of the hour, I ask about the process of turning her hit play into a novel. “When I wrote the play, I felt I had so much material – I’d done so much research, I’d spoken to so many people, I knew exactly the shape of what I wanted to write. But on stage, you only have 90 minutes… it was lovely to be able to sit down and actually lose myself in the story.” A novel allowed Miller to use her playwright’s grasp of pace— “I know an audience can fall asleep at the drop of a hat!”—but also flesh out Tessa’s background.


“Every line in a play has to tell you something and has to have some subtext within it, but you can say what [a character] is thinking in a novel. So I could excavate that psychological drama in a way that I had to be so careful about doing on stage, in case it became [a character] telling you what they are thinking all the time.” When Tessa has her own experience of sexual assault at the hands of a wealthy, entitled colleague, she must deal not only with the trauma itself but, when she decides to report it, the realisation that there is something very wrong about the way assault cases are tried: she will be cross- examined about the assault, but he will not have to take the stand. “Because she’s been on both sides of the law, she has the language to articulate where it is going wrong. So, it’s not about saying : ‘You are all idiots’ or ‘this is not fair’. It’s about saying: ‘When you do that, what you are doing is shaming and undermining me because I am actually the person who had this happen to me. I might not remember this, that or the other,


Miller trained as a lawyer and thinks the seeds of Prima Facie may have been sown at law school when she first learnt how sexual assault cases were tried. She studied at the Universit of New South Wales (UNSW) and joined a corporate law firm aſter graduating. She also signed up with the Actors Centre in Sydney, initially to help her with advocacy. Moving into human rights law, she also found the time to study for an MA in theatre and film at UNSW, as well as bringing up children. Her first play “Cross Sections” transferred to the Sydney Opera House in 2003, and eventually she was able to combine her two passions in a dual career: three days a week as a playwright and three days a week as a lawyer. In 2010, she became a full-time playwright aſter taking up a residency at the National Theatre in London. But it was only recently that she felt she had “the language and the craſt to be able to have such a complex conversation in a story... I want people to be able to have a laugh with her as well [and see] the whole person.”


The play has already had an extraordinary reach. A judge at the Old Bailey who saw the play in the West End got in touch with Miller to say she was going to rewrite the directions to the jury regarding what they can and can’t consider when they deliberate on rape cases. As a novel, Prima Facie , with its blistering points about class, power, the patriarchy and the law shaped by generations of men, should reach many more. The week aſter we speak, Miller


is due to fly to New York Cit to give a talk to the United Nations “on how writing can have an impact that can lead to change in the world”, she explains. “And I do strongly believe that stories can change the world.” Alice O’Keeffe


Hutchinson Heinemann, 14th March, £16.99, hb, 9781529153644


Photography: Sarah Hadley


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