I watched a stream of Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer as Tessa, in the only remotely busy cinema I’ve encountered since the pandemic. It could have been the long, sweaty walk there in the early August heatwave, the lack of air-conditioning, or the subject matter, but during the two hours or so I spent in there, it was as if I was gently suffocating. I was so immersed until the end that I only remembered to breathe deeply once I was outside again and could feel at least a faint, de-nauseating breeze on my face.

Tessa is a hungry young defence barrister, off to the races with the other “thoroughbreds”, a term which sets up the play’s opening gambit: the law as a horse race, one which might seem breathlessly fast were it not for Comer’s masterful delivery. In this performance, Tessa is both a performer and a spectator, or even a puppeteer. Or so she thinks, as she regales us with a blow-by-blow of exactly how she mercilessly takes down a cross-examination witness. She stacks up victories defending accused perpetrators of sexual assault against alleged victims with relish rather than qualms, knowing the legal odds are in her favour. The thrilling, pacy prologue hints at the volatility of success; one person winning depends on someone else losing—and losing hard. Later, Tessa is herself assaulted, and the personal and professional turmoil that ensues constitutes the play’s central concern.

Tessa cannot initially relate to the experience of sexual abuse, as is made painfully clear as she gleefully imitates her pitiful opponents

Weeks later at the Edinburgh Fringe, I attended a live performance of another one-woman show, Ghislaine/Gabler, written by and starring Kristin Winters. Like Tessa, its central character both experiences sexual abuse and enables predators, but more directly, from the other side of the law. The title likens Ghislaine Maxwell to Henrik Ibsen’s character Hedda Gabler, a high-born and isolated woman. Like Ibsen’s other female protagonists, Gabler wants out of a loveless marriage. Nora (A Doll’s House) achieves this by leaving; Gabler does so by taking her own life.

As well as being alone, the hybrid figure of Ghislaine/Gabler suffers identity crises, as a slightly contrived reading of Sylvia Plath’s Mirror illustrates. Winters’ text develops this theme by having ‘Ghislaine’ deny that she is like ‘Gabler’ while, of course, the two characters are merged. Instability of identity is also present in a more essential sense. Gabler and Maxwell both depend on their fathers—financially, professionally, and for their trademark surnames, which Ghislaine clings to, quite literally, for dear life: “Maxwells don’t shoot themselves”. Choosing to live allows Ghislaine to defy being defined as Gabler, but also recaptures her in the Maxwell web of her father’s making.

When we meet Tessa, by contrast, she is detached from her original context. Having grown up working class in Liverpool, the ‘old boys’ club’ into which she enters, first in a Cambridge Law degree and then in Chambers, is relatively foreign to her. New prestige first comes with an erotic charge, and office sex seems—fleetingly, before it turns sinister—to epitomise unencumbered individual freedom. By contrast, Ghislaine/Gabler is groomed from earliest infancy into a parallel, patriarchal, predatory environment, her father Robert Maxwell’s circle, a system which she later rises to perpetuate with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Tessa, meanwhile, cannot initially relate to the experience of sexual abuse at all, as is made painfully clear in the courtroom scenes she conjures up, gleefully imitating her pitiful opponents. Perhaps this is why, unlike Ghislaine, she is eventually able to see her experience for what it is.

In a box studio with an audience of less than a dozen, Ghislaine/Gabler—and Ghislaine/Gabler the character—appears less ‘impressive’ than the National Theatre sell-out Prima Facie. The intimacy is uncomfortable, fitting for a story without any satisfying resolution. The audience cannot avoid confronting Ghislaine/Gabler’s utter strangeness and seeming inhumanity. With Winters confined to a rectangle of white tape, Ghislaine/Gabler becomes an object for observation, but at the same time a subject who strains against that role and “these four walls”. Winters’ direct address, while re-enacting how Ghislaine would introduce young girls to her predator father, had me quite thrown.

The production cherry-picks Gabler references, and heavily mixes the lifelike, understated, ‘naturalistic’ style associated with Ibsen’s plays with an opposing, starker approach that makes it impossible to forget that you are in a theatre, even brazenly crossing the fourth wall between actor and audience at one point. Ghislaine/Gabler reminds us that she is constantly being watched by CCTV in her cell. Ironically, though, acknowledging the spectacle at work really serves to reinforce the barrier alienating us from her; as an audience, we cannot help but be complicit in this work of visual deconstruction.

Tessa loses in court, but at least finds a kind of resolution in speaking her truth to the audience

Prima Facie deploys this self-awareness in performance, known as metatheatre, in the opposite way, to engage us in something active. In the voice of the Cambridge fellow welcoming Tessa and other students to a Law degree, Comer bids us: “Look to your left. Look to your right”. Next time, in the concluding monologue, the phrase is more urgent, signifying the one in three women who experience sexual assault in their lifetime. Our bodies make up the statistic, as Comer reminds us with an accusing nod to the ‘old boys’ in the back of our own audience, which doubles as the courtroom. They are always ready to defend each other’s privilege and predatory behaviour, likely because their own is at stake too. In her gaze, they are behind us, while with her, we look left and right. Our solidarity is with Tessa, not the onlookers.

This alliance does not arise because Tessa is an unproblematic character: she defends sexual predators for a living. Rather, it emerges throughout the show, as we are first swept along in the current of Tessa’s ambition, before seeing her be overpowered. If law is theatre, Tessa is a natural, donning a masculine-coded wig and robes as ruthlessly as she gathers titles and wins cases. In this system, self-aggrandisement means expanding the bodily self quite literally by acquiring yet another layer of clothing—and also of wealth and prestige. Where Prima Facie (until the bitter end) treats identity as a game that can be won repeatedly through the professional rat race, Ghislaine/Gabler can manifestly not afford this playfulness.

Ghislaine is always ‘perceived’ by the men around her, long before she is imprisoned. She is ‘dissected’ and dehumanised, and even seems to accept this herself, casually slipping into the minds of her prison guards watching ‘some woman’. Over the course of the hour, Winters strips down from a red-orange blazer and skirt to barefoot in a bodycon dress, then to plain underwear, cutting a much smaller figure by the end. Where Tessa fashions herself by dressing up, Ghislaine/Gabler disrobes, as if to get at some tangible centre.

Finding herself is hard for Ghislaine/Gabler because she has also been playing a part. She threatens that “women are capable of being monsters”, while effectively manspreading; she has been representing phallic authority, not herself. When accused, her guilt and vulnerability unravel. “You have no idea what a real monster looks like”. Winters rubs her arm and reaches out repeatedly, manically, begging for the audience’s belief in her.

Helped by the insistent, building soundtrack from Self-Esteem, Comer, as Tessa, does ultimately win the audience’s sympathy, having herself joined the one in three, moved chambers, and shed her lawyer’s trappings onstage. But Tessa can no longer see herself in her profession, something shared with Ghislaine, in addition to sexual trauma. Neither can now trust those around them—anyone could be a monster. Tessa loses in court, but at least finds a kind of resolution in speaking her truth to the audience. Like us, she is also free to walk away from the scene at the end. We leave Ghislaine, however, in prison, for her own part in Epstein’s abuse. She finds herself disfigured as well as ‘dissected’: like Plath’s ‘terrible fish’, she no longer recognises herself.