It is the story of a turnaround that prompts us to question the foundations of the judicial system in the handling of rape cases. First Faceby Australian-British playwright Suzie Miller, arrives in France at the Théâtre Montparnasse, in Paris, after its noted and award-winning creation in 2022 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London.
This play in the form of a monologue tells the story of Tessa, a young woman from a working-class background, who leaves Liverpool for Cambridge Law School and rises through the ranks to become a brilliant criminal lawyer specializing in defense. men accused of sexual assault or rape. Straight in her boots, she fiercely uses all methods to defend her clients’ version, destabilize and discredit the victims.
Tessa wins all her cases. Until the day his life turns upside down. After a drunken evening, a criminal lawyer from his office rapes her. The lawyer finds herself a victim, a complainant. She will spend seven hundred and eighty-two days asserting her rights, struggling in a legal procedure which, although she knows the smallest ins and outs, will close in on her, casting doubt on her story and her absence. of consent.
Powerful and trying climate
In a staging that is both refined and ingenious by Géraldine Martineau – where a large mirror occupies the entire back of the stage, sending Tessa back to the other side of the bar, facing her troubles and her pain, and the audience to his role as voyeur and judge – this monologue plunges us into a climate that is both powerful and trying, from which we emerge a little dejected and stunned. “Something has to change”, as Suzie Miller forcefully argues, in this law shaped by generations of men where the burden of proof falls on the female victim, where the “buts” (” more “ you have consumed a lot of alcohol; ” more “ do you think he understood that you were not consenting; ” more “ why not call for help, etc.) continue to call into question the word of the abused woman. “Prima facie”, “at first glance”, the complainant is not clear.
Elodie Navarre, who was twice nominated for Molières for The sonby Florian Zeller, in 2018, and for his role in The beautifulsby Léonore Confino, in 2020, takes this character of a lawyer-victim head on and accurately embodies the different protagonists of this terrible story. Like the text, drawn to perfection, the actress plays with precision and with just the right amount of rage, but without ever falling into excess emotion.
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