Steve_Bamlett_blog

In most legal proceedings, one party has a burden of proof, which requires it to present ‘prima facie’ evidence for all of the essential facts in its case. If it cannot, its claim may be dismissed without any need for a response by other parties’. [1] Some near-verse lines based on seeing the play Prima Facie a repetition of a live-stream at the Odeon in Durham on 20^th September 2024. I was half the audience. Oh Durham!

Prima Facie (play) – https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/prima-facie/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74882244

This is just a pre-draft of lines done fairly rapidly in preparation for a possible poem. After I found them, for a reason I can’t put my finger on, triggering, I am leaving them as they are – just to mark Jody Comer’s brilliance in this play.

In most legal proceedings, one party has a burden of proof, which requires it to present prima facie evidence for all of the essential facts in its case. If it cannot, its claim may be dismissed without any need for a response by other parties.^[4] A prima facie case might not stand or fall on its own; if an opposing party introduces other evidence or asserts an affirmative defense, it can be reconciled only with a full trial. Sometimes the introduction of prima facie evidence is informally called making a case or building a case. For example, in a trial under criminal law, the prosecution has the burden of presenting prima facie evidence of each element of the crime charged against the defendant. [2]

One woman on a stage!
But what’s a stage? All the world’s
A stage and men and women
Merely players: But playing what and how
And with what power until the game’s
Own premise is contested – Then hell
inside develops out into the spoils of
seven-hundred and eighty-two days
Just waiting to be believed.

One woman on a stage:
It takes someone who, in herself,
And in the selves she sees in others, knows
There is no truth but as it is a story
Believed. The best version of a story
Among alternatives.
How various truth seems, except when …
This is me! Me! No regulated role, just
One woman on a stage.

Lights! Action! A stage set round with shelves  files on those shelves:
The files that contain lives -
Or glasses as props to drink out of in certain scenes
Or candles, providing insufficient light
In some naughty worlds, and doused so easily
By rain. How can rain fall on a stage. And why on her?
One woman on a stage:
Her red top makes red bruises unread.

One woman on a stage
Dressed to kill
Or to be raped, they’ll say, at her own will.

One woman on a stage.
It’s only a stage mind – a passing pomp of play -
A stage in which the arrangement of one chair and two tables,
Or properties brought in from silly places
Like those glasses or those candles.
When required like foiled witnesses all ‘on us' try
To tell a story all or most believe.

One woman on a stage
One woman only on a jury.
The court’s all men besides.
But can the fallible be believed?
One woman at that stage
Looks fallible and fictive?
Me? One woman on a stage.

In court she held the stage,
One woman on a stage:
Miss Ensler now not Tess or Mum’s Scouse Tessa,
She’s perfect at it: ‘She’s good’ folks say;
That woman on the stage.

That woman at the stage where
Controlling the tension of witnesses, letting
Them feel their narrative control
Will the easier undermine it, reducing
Witness vigilance so that some fallible fact
Or mode of telling stories
Stands out. You see the teller of tales make that
Too-easy assumption:
That everyone sometimes  assumes that
They  are telling us, telling themselves,
The thing they hold and told as truth.

In Tessa’s past, one woman on a stage:
 – the head of Law at Cambridge, said:
‘You’re the crème de la crème’ -  as if Miss Brodie
Never said it first and in her prime.
“Look around you- look left, look right.
One in three of you will fail.
It might be you? You think, unclear whether
You, or Julian with the plummy voice,
Or Mia on the right. For Tess, these are the one  against
Her, though only sat there by some contingency.

One woman on a stage
Its Mia who fails
But the fact doesn’t ail
Her as she becomes:
One woman on a stage:
Doing Becket’s Happy Days in Oz!
(Australia she meant)

One time that woman on the edge
Of a stage of vanity contingent
On praise, since
she reduced witnesses to rape
To pulp …..
Enacted her control by offering to take
Julian’s plum plumb inside her on an office couch.

One woman on a couch not stage.
Another day the drinking over-done dictates
That one woman’s at that stage
Where she enacts vomiting over a chair
That she, prime actor as she is, makes seem a toilet bowl
Whose stench overcomes even us.

One woman on a stage
Embedded there : Carried to that bed
By him, Julian Brookes, whom as yet
No Queen is against.
Takes both her hands in his hand
Over her head; the other
Closes her mouth. How to make
A witness fallible, robbed
Of voice that once was that of
One woman on a legal stage.

One woman at a stage
In her career where legal truth no longer
Does the work of any truth.
On this stage where one woman says:
‘This Is Me!’

This is Me!
One woman on a stage.
A witness now, not a major player,
But raised still on a stage of sorts.
One whose being hangs upon belief
Of trial by jury.
A barrister for the defence
she was whose role that once was
As one woman on a stage
Tested the law, ensured no flaw
In someone’s witness does not gets stated:

Cast doubt like chaff that’s sown and bears no fruit
Of belief  juries hear in their story, That’s truth!
After all! The best story you can tell.
Which means it undermines the tales,
Others tell.

One woman on a legal stage:
By the time her test of witness tales terminates
Intent fulfilled, with witnesses, whose words
Will seem mere confabulation posed by
The vanity Of human wishes to feel
In control of the truth you tell,
As one person on a stage.

Then there’s  one woman on a stage
In rain where no rain should be
Who learns she wants
To assume she was telling herself
The truth and nothing but.
The truth as it seemed
On first impression, prima facie,
The first face of her
That woman on a stage.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxx

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[1] Prima facie – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_facie

[2] Prima facie – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_facie