Inter Alia, National Theatre review - dazzling performance, questionable writing

Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.

With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at 105 minutes, which gives her main character’s point of view of the tensions between the personal and the professional.

At the start, Jessica is shown in court, ruling her work environment with a strong hand, putting male barristers in their place, and showing feminist empathy to rape victims. At the same time, she has to balance the emotional needs of her husband Michael, a barrister, and their rather shy 17-year-old son Harry, plus the typical chores of daily life, from shopping to ironing to hosting dinner parties for their high-flying friends and work colleagues (which we see through her eyes). Because a sexual assault was central to Prima Facie, and since this play starts with her presiding over a rape case, it’s obvious that Inter Alia will involve a similar accusation against one of the men in her life.

In the context of our current preoccupations with the manosphere, Andrew Tate and the Netflix hit Adolescence, there are no prizes for guessing that Harry will be involved. But before we get there, Miller explores Jessica’s experiences of bringing him up, showing the differences between the sweet little boy and the more taciturn teenager, making the point that most mothers lose connection with male kids after puberty. Two excruciating, and hilarious, scenes feature her misguided attempts to talk to Harry about paedophiles and pornography. A further point (there are several points in this pointed monodrama) is that fathers often fail when it comes to bringing up boys to be responsible and sensitive adults. 
The play’s title means “among other things”, referring to Jessica’s domestic work as well as her professional job, and is an advance on Prima Facie because it explores a real moral dilemma: how can a feminist lawyer balance the need for justice in a rape case when it clashes with her desire to protect her family? Miller creates a situation, as Nina Raine did in her 2017 play Consent, in which informed knowledge of the faults of the legal system, with its disgraceful failures in rape conviction rates, are a genuine temptation to achieve a technical win at the expense of natural justice.

It has to be said that, despite this powerful central dilemma, Inter Alia is an odd piece of writing. Throughout there’s a tense mix of psychological realism and wishful thinking; acute observation and banal predictability; recognizable feelings and unconvincing swerves. Sometimes it’s a lecture more than a drama, often it veers off course: the rock band element and karaoke scene are fun, but not strictly necessary. And yet. And yet: Pike’s performance holds it all together. It’s hard to forget the scene in which she has sex but can’t get a distressing court-case video image out of her mind; it’s hard not to empathize with her motherhood journey, which includes an episode when she loses little Harry in a playground; it’s hard not to applaud her robust court persona.

Clearly this is a thesis play about parental responsibility for the toxic masculinity of teenagers, and it includes an emotionally truthful moment when Harry explosively articulates the pressures of growing up today: either you participate in the sexism of your mates, or you get bullied, and end up in involuntary celibacy. There’s no sense that this excuses bad behaviour, but it does suggest that there’s another unwritten play about a teenage boy nestling inside this one. And I suppose the worst thing about Inter Alia is an ending which is so idealistic that it shirks the consequences of what has happened. Typically, the victim gets sidelined, and oddly enough the most uncomfortably provocative implication is that the perpetrator is the moral centre of the story. Ugh.

Despite all the questionable aspects of the playwriting, Pike powers through the evening in what is surely one of the best performances of the year. Not only does she delight with her interpretation of a professionally successful wife, and her observations about men, marriage and the justice system are delivered with wit and panache, but she also drops into moments of sincere doubt and deep sadness with utter conviction. Towards the end, her accelerating desperation as her family life falls apart is very moving, while at the same time she offers sparks of intelligent humour, as well as episodes of tender self-reflection.

In all this Miller is also well served by her director, fellow Australian Justin Martin, whose production is attractively designed by Miriam Buether, and features numerous theatrical devices that challenge the boring naturalism of many current stagings. Simple props abound, like a limp mic used to indicate a deflated male ego, and a dinner party table setting or an awkward ironing board carry a metaphorical twinge. An infant’s coat stands in for a small child, a Hawaiian shirt conjures up maternal love, and kitchen cupboards help dispose unwanted props. Pike does her costume changes, where a kitchen apron morphs into judge’s robes, on stage, and this gives a snappy pace to the show.

Although Jasper Talbot’s Harry and Jamie Glover’s Michael (pictured above) are deliberately underwritten, and apart from one highly charged episode, function just as foils, their stage presence as rock musicians gives the play an exciting buzz. If you can easily pardon the predictability of the plotting, the repetition of feminist insights and the déjà vu analysis of the depressing failure of the English criminal justice system, then you still have to contend with Miller’s rather manipulative writing style and its crude moments of melodrama. However, on the plus side there are genuine moral problems on view here, and the whole play offers an energizing, even dazzling, tour de force by its star actor, who’s always charismatic. Welcome back, Rosamund Pike.

• Inter Alia at the National Theatre until 13 September 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

@AleksSierz