MeToo hasn’t always made for great art – but now there's Jodie Comer’s Prima Facie | Emma Brockes
On Broadway, there wasn’t an empty seat in the house – and we finally saw how compelling stories of victimhood can bet comes around intermittently every few years; a show on Broadway that reminds us why theatre beats every other medium hands down and almost justifies the cost of the tickets. So it was last night, walking down 45th Street in New York past foyers sparse with patrons, to something as close to a mob scene as a person with one eye on their phone for the babysitter can get.
Comer, who plays a barrister whose assumptions about the law are upended when she is sexually assaulted, has a big following after her role in Killing Eve. And the play, by Suzie Miller, is brilliant. But none of that fully explains it. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house on Tuesday night and the audience was as keyed up as any I’ve seen since Hamilton in 2015, or going back much further to.
Artworks triggered by or related to the #MeToo movement have appeared in numbers in recent months, and it’s curious to note which of them work and which don’t. I happened to see the filmlast week, an energy-free adaptation of the book of the same name by the two New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story.
‘On screen, She Said was as flat as a pancake, the two leads desperately trying to resuscitate a script of aching dullness and piety.’ Carey Mulligan, left, and Zoe Kazan in She Said.What I loved about the book – a sober, studious account of that groundbreaking reporting that was far superior to’s showboating rival effort – killed the movie.
The real #MeToo movie – the one that animated the themes of that movement in a way that didn’t feel like homework or feature women making endless, drippy faces at each other – was Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated. We talk about the flattening effect of the term “victim”, and here was an example of how to energise and enliven stories around victimhood without losing all the other markers of what makes us human. In Women Talking, the women are savage, hilarious, absurd – fully real, in other words.
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