Inter Alia

Time Out

12 hours ago

Playwrights usually want to flex their range after their first big hit. But it's to the credit of Suzie Miller that she cares so much about the issues explored in her smash Prima Facie that she's come up with a follow up that you have to at least describe as 'a companion piece'.
Both Prima Facie and Inter Alia are named after legal terms, both are about high-achieving female members of the legal profession, and while Prima Facie was a monologue and Inter Alia is a three-hander, both have a huge-scale female role at their centre that makes them the perfect vehicle for a screen star looking to scratch the stage itch. And so both have had Justin Martin-directed UK premieres starring major celebrities: Jodie Comer made her stage debut in Prima Facie, while Rosamund Pike treads the boards for the first time in years in Inter Alia.
The most crucial similarity, however, is not entirely apparent from the first half hour or so of Inter Alia, which is basically an extended sequence of Pike's high court judge Jessica frenziedly girlbossing as she juggles her extremely high-powered job with a busy social life and being a mum to vulnerable teen Harry (Jasper Talbot). It's a breathless performance from Pike, who crests and surges from neuroticism to icy confidence. It's draining: there's barely room for us or her to breathe, and a sequence where she sings Shania Twain's 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman!' in a karaoke club feels like the conclusion of an extended intro basically designed to let Pike show off.
But she is good: of course she's posh, but she's earthy, likeable, open, vulnerable, somewhat demystifying of her profession.
And it's not entirely unsubtle writing, just full tilt. We're bouncing around in Jessica's head, and being asked to consider that she is attempting to fulfil several impossible roles: neither the perfect mother nor the perfect judge really exist, and certainly not a seamless mix of the two.
Martin's production is notably more sophisticated than Prima Facie: he and his team use puppetry, illusions, child actors, live music and other effects to create a world that's half naturalistically rendered, half foggy memories of Harry's childhood.
It's impossible to discuss what happens next without spoilers: if I dropped a veiled reference to Netflix's Adolescence you'd get it straight away. So let's cut to the chase: like Prima Facie, Inter Alia concerns rape and the difficulty in securing a conviction for it. The accused here is of course Harry, and despite Jessica's feminist politics and her awareness of the statistics and sensitivities around these sorts of cases, she wants to believe there has been a mistake.
But Miller is very good at exploring the ambiguity of rape cases. On the one hand there's the fact that ambiguity is why most of them fail in court – it is extremely difficult to obtain clearcut evidence (helpfully Jessica early on describes a rare successful prosecution). But there's also a moral vagueness that Jessica and her husband Michael (Jamie Glover) cling to, the sense that due to different understandings of the incident Harry and the girl in question might both be 'right', that she Jessica can hold on to her principles and her beloved son by telling herself Harry did wrong but misunderstood the situation. Miller's plays explore why rape convictions are so rare, and portraying Harry as wildly unsympathetically would not help in that regard,
Inter Alia gets a lot stronger after the rape storyline emerges: it gives the play a sense of purpose, channelling Pike's manically fizzing energies towards something more than than a showcase of her range.
Miller is more interested in the emotional and legal terrain Jessica finds herself in here than diagnosing exactly why a young man might do this. But her play is not incurious in that respect, and there's a particularly powerful scene when a frantic Jessica excoriates her self-absorbed husband over his failure to explain boundaries to their son. It's cruel of her to lay this on him; but she strikes a nerve that begs the question.
Yes, Inter Alia is kind of a big performance lecture exploring a subject that is close to Miller's heart to the point of artistic fixation. It is a contrivance that her plays concern women who are high up in the legal profession and thus able to clearly explain the mechanics of what's going on. But once warmed up Inter Alia hits home thoughtfully and forcefully. Adolescence can't be the only word on this subject. And where that used virtuoso camerawork and cleverly shifting perspectives to tell its story in an artful manner, Inter Alia benefits from a gale-force Pike and a sophisticated production from Martin – its final image will chill you to the bone.