---
title: "Prima Facie puts SA’s sexual violence crisis and broken legal system on stage"
description: "Suzie Miller’s one-woman play about the terrible complicity between a defective legal system and the scourge of sexual violence is both hugely entertaining and deeply affecting."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "THEATRE REVIEW"
author: "Keith Bain"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/keith_bain/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-08-17-prima-facie-puts-sa-s-sexual-violence-crisis-and-broken-legal-system-on-stage/"
published: "2026-08-17T07:00:00"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1209
---

# Prima Facie puts SA’s sexual violence crisis and broken legal system on stage

> Suzie Miller’s one-woman play about the terrible complicity between a defective legal system and the scourge of sexual violence is both hugely entertaining and deeply affecting.

By Keith Bain · Published 17 August 2026, 09:00 SAST

## Key points
- Prima Facie, Suzie Miller’s one‑woman play, lands in Cape Town as a blistering indictment of how a broken legal system helps sexual violence thrive – blunt, emotional and urgent.
- Danica De La Rey Jones is revelatory: she inhabits a winning defence lawyer and two dozen others, charting a harrowing 782‑day descent as the system she trusted turns on her.
- Neil Coppen’s invisible direction, sparse set, clever costume shifts and Charl‑Johan Lingenfelder’s pulsing soundscape keep the focus on the story – culminating in a mirror‑moment that implicates the audience.
- The play makes a furious, unignorable case that “legal truth” often trumps justice.

## Content

For a play so incredibly wordy, [Prima Facie](https://baxter.uct.ac.za/events/prima-facie) is ultimately not theatre you need to follow intellectually. Instead, it is drama you feel, its message a punch to the gut, its argument so thoroughly down to the simple logic of what it means to be human that the weight of it lands in your heart, fills you with a kind of emotional “Aha!” long before any need to unpick its meaning or intellectualise its discourse.

In the days leading up to Women’s Day, a South Africanised version of this powerful Australian play landed at the Baxter in Cape Town and hit like a megaton bomb.

Such is the urgency of what it has to say about the legal conditions that, instead of protecting women, ultimately cause sexual violence to fester.

It also provides a shocking account of the myriad ways in which our so-called justice system subjects female victims of sexual assault to successive rounds of institutionalised abuse. It’s not only about a deficient legal system, though, but also about a society that demonises women who dare speak up about the violence they suffer at the hands of men.

![prima-facie-theatre](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/4G4sDhu742tEgvtRjtwqx_2oBaY=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/DanicaDeLaReyJonesinPrimaFacie_QuaidJones_258624.jpg)

*Danica De La Rey Jones in Prima Facie. (Photo: Quaid Jones)*

Prima Facie has, since its debut in Sydney in 2019, made waves around the world, been translated into various languages and performed everywhere from Iceland to Nepal.

It’s hard to imagine a more important place for it to have landed than here in South Africa, where the scourge of sexual violence is exacerbated by corrupt, incompetent policing and lacklustre jurisprudence.

In SA, we hear endlessly about gender-based violence, yet nothing ever seems to change. By taking us through courtroom procedure, this play provides clear evidence why: because the system itself is stacked against women, the law overwhelmingly deaf to their suffering, preferring to discredit them while the courts and their legal procedures extend the benefit of the doubt to the perpetrators.

Think these ideas are overstated or obvious? The statistics prove otherwise.

Danica De La Rey Jones, who plays the lawyer at the centre of the story as well as at least two dozen ancillary characters who weave in and out of the narrative, is a revelation, her performance captivating. She’s also quite a lot of fun, at least until her story stops being any fun at all. And at that point it segues into a nightmarish reality that’s vividly, uncompromisingly expressed.

First she gives a lovely, lively, slightly cheeky embodiment of a first-class defence attorney who relishes her courtroom victories above all else. And then there’s her tender, agonising portrayal of this lawyer’s spiralling transformation over a period of 782 days after falling foul of precisely the kind of man she has had so much success at keeping out of prison.

Her shift, from someone who commands respect and attention in the courtroom to a woman who is demeaned and discredited by the same legal system she has held in such esteem, is vital, tender and heartbreaking.

Gripping to watch and ultimately so brave as she endures her character’s descent into an emotional abyss, De La Rey Jones is, as a performer, pleasantly unconventional; instead of relying on trite techniques, she seems to gather truth from some place deep within.

![prima-facie-theatre](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/3kdK8cBaFCjtKLPGU7brHoKQ6E4=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/DeLaReyJonessperformanceisgrippingandbraveassheendureshercharactersdescentintoanemotionalabyss_QuaidJones_967139.jpg)

*De La Rey Jones’ performance is gripping and brave as she endures her character’s descent into an emotional abyss. (Photo: Quaid Jones)*

![prima-facie-theatre](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/sJBdIHauhl65AhS57xQBqSxHsSY=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/Thephysicaldesignoftheplayissimilarlyunobtrusiveandeverythingsimplyworkseffortlessly_QuaidJones_781568.jpg)

*The physical design of the play is unobtrusive, and everything works effortlessly. (Photo: Quaid Jones)*

She is eminently watchable, even in the toughest moments, and even when the script requires her to look the audience squarely in the eyes and do what lawyers do: present a solemn closing argument – a plea, really – that leaves you in no doubt what you’re meant to think.

It is not a comforting play, there is no recourse for the victims and the odds are unfairly stacked against those who’ve been wronged. The harsh irony is that this lawyer at the centre of it all knows and understands all the loopholes, all the legal tricks and all the arguments that will be used against her in order to prove a sex offender innocent.

The tactics are brutal, but all along she’s known that the law has nothing to do with right and wrong, only with so-called “legal truth”, essentially a measure of which of two lawyers presents the more feasible, believable story. She is, ultimately, undone by the very strictures she had once held so dear.

By the end of it all, the audience has witnessed an intelligent, proud, world-at-her-fingertips woman journey to hell and back, and it’s impossible to leave the theatre without having had a piece of your soul ripped out of you.

To his enormous credit, there is barely any sign of director Neil Coppen’s masterful hand: he has kept himself invisible, empowered his actor to absolutely own the stage, take complete possession of the words so that what unfolds is a pure, unsanitised expression of collective anxiety that comes from a very honest place. There are no tricks, nothing extraneous added, nor any distractions.

![prima-facie-theatre](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/2F1aYJ4wfWSFuruMQb3_mXRTfbc=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/DirectorNeilCoppenhasempoweredhisactortoownthestageandtakecompletepossessionofthewords_QuaidJones_448984.jpg)

*Director Neil Coppen has empowered his actor to own the stage and take complete possession of the words. (Photo: Quaid Jones)*

The physical design of the play is similarly unobtrusive – and everything simply works, effortlessly. There’s the solidity of the set, with its legal tomes and case files, which – as it turns out – have little to do with justice. And there are the clever costume changes that help us navigate through various shifts in time and place.

And there’s Charl-Johan Lingenfelder’s soundtrack, which sustains and heightens a certain suspenseful atmosphere – the sense of an adrenalised heartbeat that morphs into a kind of Ibiza-inspired nightclub, and later still helps turn the blood in your veins cold with fury.

Along with the legal horrors it dredges up, this South African adaptation of the play also introduces numerous recognisable characters who help flesh out a story that must ultimately serve as a mirror held up to our society. They’re invisible, but they’re there, like ghosts, informing the complex, complicated world in which this painful story takes place.

Towards the end of the play, when screen doors are opened to reveal an actual mirror reflecting the audience back to itself, it feels in many ways like an admonition. For we are all to some extent complicit in maintaining a status quo in which women are – emotionally, statistically, factually – forced to submit to a legal system that deprioritises their suffering and diminishes their experiences in order to give the benefit of the doubt to the men who hurt, assault, abuse and rape them.

Miller’s play gives us a story that makes us feel, but it also drags actual statistical facts into the conversation, makes you in the audience part of the context that enables sexual violence to affect such a startling number of our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, girlfriends…

The question the play does not presume to address is the one we all need to ponder: Why do we permit it? **DM**

*Prima Facie is playing at Cape Town’s*[*Baxter Studio*](https://baxter.uct.ac.za/events/prima-facie)*theatre until 29 August. It will run at*[*The Market Theatre*](https://markettheatre.co.za/prima-facie-by-suzie-miller/)*in Johannesburg from 16 September to 4 October.*