Prima Facie was written as a play, not a piece of legislation. But somewhere between its Sydney debut and its West End run, Suzie Miller‘s story about a barrister confronting the legal system from the other side of a rape trial stopped being fiction and started rewriting how UK courts actually operate.
The Old Bailey Judge Who Called Suzie Miller At 9 A.M.
Miller has been asked countless times how a one-woman play ended up altering UK courtroom procedure, and her answer always starts the same way: she never saw it coming.
“It’s still quite extraordinary to me because of course you don’t write something thinking I’ll change the law. You think I’d love to change the world with this, but you don’t think it would change the law,” Miller told Deadline in a sit-down interview.
The moment it became real arrived early in the play’s West End run, when Miller’s phone rang early in the morning.
“I had a call from a judge very early on in the run on the West End…a very posh English judge from the Old Bailey and the inner city courts of London and she said, I saw your play last night and I’ve been up all night thinking about it,” she recalled.
However, Miller’s first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was panic.
“I initially was struck by terror,” she recalled. “Like, what does that mean? Are we going to be sued or will I lose my home? Are we going to have to pull the play?”
The judge wasn’t calling with a threat. She explained that she was the one responsible for drafting the jury instructions read aloud before deliberations in sexual assault cases, and after watching Prima Facie, she had gone back and rewritten the rape direction herself.
“I am the judge that’s responsible for drafting the statements that are read to the jury before they go into deliberation and they have to be read to the jury,” she recalled the judge sayinig. “And I went back and looked at the one on rape and I’ve redrafted it and I have used language from your story and I’d like to use that language. I’m just asking permission.”
Miller took the call groggy and half asleep, still adjusting to being a playwright rather than the barrister she once was. What followed was brief.
“This is 9:00 a.m. I’m a playwright. I’m usually in bed at very, very wee hours, very blur eyed. And I put down the phone after a five minute call and thought that five minutes is actually what changed so many women’s lives across the UK, which is extraordinary,” Miller noted.
That single conversation is now widely credited as the origin point for what courts in Liverpool nicknamed the “Prima Facie direction,” language addressing how trauma affects a survivor’s testimony that has since made its way into how juries are guided in sexual assault cases and how survivors who stay quiet or try to play nice in the moment should not have that response undermine their case, since that is part of trauma.
The ripple effects didn’t stop at jury instructions either. Judges and barristers from the Old Bailey went on to form an organization called TESSA, named after the play’s protagonist, dedicated to updating the country’s sexual assault legislation, and the recording of the play became mandatory viewing for newly appointed High Court judges in Northern Ireland.
For a story Miller wrote believing it might, at best, start a conversation, that’s the kind of impact most artists never get to witness in their own lifetime.
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