Prima Facie took the theatre world by storm during its West End run in 2022, with Jodie Comer’s bravura one-woman performance landing her a deserved Olivier award. Suzie Miller’s harrowing play followed a lawyer with a flair for defending men accused of sexual assault whose world is knocked off its orbit when she herself is raped. Comer acted on an almost empty stage, dipping in and out of the various characters in a performance that bristled with energy and emotion.
Inter Alia, a follow-up by Miller commissioned by the National Theatre, brings in Golden Globe-winner Rosamund Pike for its central role, although this time she’s accompanied by a small supporting cast. And while Inter Alia is clearly a companion piece, again drawing from Miller’s former career as a lawyer, it is also eager to show its points of difference.
Before the play starts, a drab stage features the UK’s royal crest mounted on the wall above an empty table and cardboard boxes stuffed with legal documents. But as the lights go out, this makeshift set is hoisted into the air, revealing a neon version of the crest and a dramatically lit Pike growling into a microphone. It sets the tone for a play that maintains the kinetic, exhausting central performance of Prima Facie but places it amid something much bigger and more complex, with a cast that’s constantly in motion and a set that’s forever shifting from playpark to kitchen to courthouse.
Pike plays Jessica Parks, a young judge and ardent feminist who’s married to an alpha-male lawyer. They have a son together, an awkward boy who becomes an awkward young man. We see Jessica playing with him in the park, clutching an empty child’s puffer jacket as a prop. Then we see Jessica on the legal bench sticking up for sexual assault victims as predatory defence lawyers attempt to dismantle their stories. She prides herself on her “soft skills” but in her head she’s roaring “fuck you”.
It does not take a huge leap of imagination to guess where all this is heading (whether this is deliberate foreshadowing or writing that’s a little too eager to set up some Big Questions is up for debate) and when Jessica’s son Harry returns home from a party with a suspicious cut, the family’s middle class dream begins to crumble.
Miller again explores the murky overlap between morality and the law, a place where everyone is entitled to representation and attack is often the best form of defence. Jessica believes women – but does she believe them over her own son? And what are the limits of her idealism?
It’s a veritable dauphinoise of layers, each character a prism through which to explore the play’s themes. Jessica has professional supremacy over her husband but plays the more subservient role at home. Harry is a gawky, lovable sort who has become mired in the online “manosphere”. Indeed, Inter Alia shares some DNA with Netflix hit Adolescence, which also revolves around a son drawn into a world of toxic masculinity.
What it doesn’t share with Adolescence is its subtlety of writing: Miller’s work is far more direct, constructing so perfect a moral maze for its characters to navigate that it feels ever-so-slightly contrived.
It’s enthralling, though. Pike is exceptional as a woman attempting to have it all, and then to hold it all together. Her performance is every bit as energetic as Comer’s, with bursts of karaoke and on-stage costume changes and dancing on tables and some impressive routines involving props being thrown and caught. At one point she chucks a cocktail sausage into the audience, which bounced off the chest of a theatre critic (that’s a star dropped, right there). There are a dizzying number of plates to keep spinning and director Justin Martin does a commendable job of keeping them all in one piece.
Ultimately it’s not as compelling as Prima Facie but any shortcomings in the writing are easily forgiven when you have a central performance this good: Pike feels like a sure thing come awards season.
• Inter Alia is on at the National Theatre