Prima Facie at Carriageworks - A Searing Elegy for Justice Forsaken and an Unflinching Reckoning That Demands Our Conscience.

In a city carved from sandstone and steeped in contested notions of justice, Prima Facie returns to Sydney not as revival, but as reckoning - an overdue verdict whispered through clenched teeth. Following its lauded runs on the West End and Broadway, Suzie Miller’s searing monologue finds fresh potency at Carriageworks, delivered with visceral acuity by Sof Forrest and steered with unflinching composure by director Kate Champion. Here, performance becomes protest - sharp, assured, and impossible to look away from.

Make no mistake - this is not merely the return of a play. It is the homecoming of a cultural reckoning, sharpened by its distance and deepened by its resonance. In the hands of Black Swan State Theatre Company, Prima Facie transcends the confines of performance to become something far more potent: not just theatre, but testimony. A visceral deposition delivered under lights, it speaks not from the stage, but from the wound.

Forrest’s portrayal of Tessa, a formidable criminal defence barrister, is nothing short of seismic - layered, blistering, and profoundly humane. She inhabits the language of the law with the fluency of someone for whom it has long been armour and identity - until a single, shattering event fractures that fluent certainty. What follows is a devastating recalibration: from advocate to accuser, from master of the system to its most vulnerable subject. The courtroom, once her battleground of clarity and control, is rendered a disorienting maze - where justice proves not merely blind, but insidiously, institutionally deaf.

Here, the stage is rendered with austere precision - pared back to its essential architecture, allowing Carriageworks’ industrial frame to reverberate with the sterile chill of institutional indifference. It evokes a contemporary coliseum, where women are too often made to bleed for belief, and credibility is bartered like coin. Champion’s direction leans into this sparseness with rigor and restraint, resisting ornamentation in favour of elemental clarity. The trust placed in the text - and in Forrest - is absolute. And it is rewarded. With voice, posture, and a gaze that holds and haunts, Forrest unspools a narrative so searingly intimate, so stripped of theatrical affect, it transcends performance entirely - becoming something closer to collective inhalation.

No chorus, no myth. Just bureaucracy as theatre, and the patriarchy with a pen.

This iteration of Prima Facie resonates with an unmistakably Australian cadence - not merely in accent, but in its cultural inflection, its moral timbre. Grounded, unembellished, and unflinchingly proximate, it engages not in abstract lament, but in the forensic excavation of national truths. Every inflection, every procedural detail, every visual motif is weighted with local specificity, anchoring the narrative firmly in our own legal and social terrain. The play insists: this is not elsewhere - this is here.

And here, too, justice is often more artefact than ideal, its scales tilted by design. Not unlike a Greek tragedy shorn of its chorus, Prima Facie exposes the patriarchal machinery not as mythic or monstrous, but as banal - meted out in forms, filings, and a relentless privileging of process over pain.

Allegory weaves itself through the fabric of Prima Facie with quiet force. Tessa is not solely an individual - she is archetype and avatar. An Antigone armed with jurisprudence instead of lineage, a Cassandra in courtroom silk, her truth articulated with precision yet perpetually unheard until silence becomes the only echo. The legal system, cloaked in the illusion of impartiality, emerges as a modern-day Gorgon - its gaze not merely unfeeling, but actively petrifying to those who challenge it without the armour of male legitimacy. Here, myth converges with institutional reality, revealing a landscape where justice does not merely fail, but forbids.

This production eschews the familiar scaffolding of theatrical illusion, placing its trust instead in the unvarnished potency of presence and truth. Its impact lies not in spectacle, but in the emotional architecture it so meticulously constructs - layered with precision, stripped of sentimentality, and calibrated for rupture. The most arresting effect is not visual, but ethical: truth, articulated with clarity and without concession. Forrest delivers a performance of extraordinary tensile strength - a study in restraint, where anguish simmers beneath forensic control. There are no sentimental indulgences, no melodramatic crescendos - only the slow, inexorable immersion into a legal apparatus so shackled to precedent it can no longer recognise justice when it stands before it, trembling.

A mirror held mercilessly to our cultural blind spots, it doesn’t beg for sympathy - it indicts our silence.

What endures beyond the final line is not merely the descent, but the mirror the work so unflinchingly raises - polished to a forensic gleam, unmerciful in its reflection of our collective inertia.

Prima Facie is less a narrative than a diagnostic - clinical in its clarity, damning in its implications. It does not soothe with resolution; it unsettles with recognition. The courtroom, once presumed a bastion of impartiality, is revealed instead as a theatre of sanctioned erasure - where silence is misread as consent, and process eclipses principle. The play does not ask for passive witness. It issues a challenge: having seen this, what will you choose to unsee?

At moments, the stage transforms into an arena of ruthless spectacle, where words are honed into weapons and silence is weaponized into complicity. In this light, Prima Facie eschews sympathy; it commands a reckoning.

In partnership with Teach Us Consent, Carriageworks extends the ethical frontier of theatre well beyond the footlights. The performance transcends mere spectacle to become an invocation - a summons that unsettles complacency. The question ceases to invite passive reception and instead demands reflection: What kind of witness will you choose to be?

Despite the weight of its subject, Prima Facie unfolds with the grace of a dancer - resolute in conviction yet fluid in its expression. It throbs with raw humanity, sharp wit, and glimmers of hope, tempered always by a hard-earned wisdom. Fiercely, it embraces the possibility of something better. In Sof Forrest’s command, Tessa emerges as both sentinel and champion - a figure who has traversed the flames not for acclaim, but to illuminate the path forward.

In an era where “justice” is frequently diluted by the churn of media soundbites and political posturing, Prima Faciereclaim its true breadth - complex, imperfect, and profoundly human.

This is theatre as both indictment and elegy, as a powerful act of resurrection. It stands as essential viewing for anyone who still mistakes legality for justice.

Prima Facie runs at Carriageworks, 2-12 July 2025.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Carriageworks / Daniel Boud.