“Inter Alia” at the Lyttelton, National Theatre
Jeremy Malies on the South Bank
27 July 2025
Australian Suzie Miller wrote plays as a child and studied law as a young adult. Her 2022 one-person drama Prima Facie (also at the National Theatre) had Jodie Comer playing a barrister who focuses on defence of people accused of sexual assaults. Her world and work perspective are turned upside down by the fallout from being date-raped herself by a colleague.
Jasper Talbot and Rosamund Pike.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
Inter Alia is a companion piece. It’s a three-hander though the focus is on Rosamund Pike as Crown Court judge Jessica who we first meet as she is slapping down a male barrister in a case involving – it comes as no surprise – a sexual assault.
And the fulcrum of this play is also a sexual assault, with spoiler considerations meaning it can’t really be detailed. Where this often unwieldy and hectoring script takes off is (again) the behaviour of the female protagonist as the type of crime she is accustomed to evaluating in a detached way comes crashing into her own life.
There are wonderful ironies and tensions running through the play as one of Jessica’s first reflections on her profession is that it’s difficult to get convictions in rape cases. We see Pike using her formidable technique to send us back to that pronouncement later on when the likelihood of a rape allegation sticking suddenly comes very close to home.
Jessica’s husband, Michael, another lawyer and a King’s Counsel, is played by Jamie Glover. Their 18-year-old son Harry is played by Jasper Talbot. We first see father and son at the back of the stage as (tongue-in-cheek but credible) rock musicians with Glover on guitar and Talbot on drums. Music direction (Nick Pinchbeck) has Pike sing a Tina Turner number wonderfully in a karaoke scene which she must create entirely herself. The angst injected skilfully by Glover reminded me of the eminently sane put-upon father in Next to Normal.
Jasper Talbot and Jamie Glover.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
Miriam Buether’s set focuses on the kitchen which must double up as the courtroom but then, as Harry (possibly in Jessica’s mind) returns to childhood and playtime with a nursery school girlfriend, Buether proves adept in introducing forestry and a spectral almost fairy-tale feel. This is brought out by Natasha Chivers’s ethereal lighting which has the quality of a woodcut.
“There’s all sorts of interesting issues buzzing around this play” was a verdict I heard from an American theatre-goer as we filed out of the Lyttelton. One of the real merits is a puncturing of the hypocrisies of the ultra-liberal upper middle class who can be woke until they wield a kind of realpolitik in a law court to protect one of their own. Miller does all this from her standpoint of seeing legal systems under a yoke of patrimony, but she is always self-aware and probing. There is also considered discussion of pornography as it impacts on adolescents and the phenomenon of the secondary school incel.
It’s a high-octane 105 minutes during which Pike does not leave the stage, and there is hardly a wasted moment in Justin Martin’s direction as he propels the plotline. He is also skilful in his handling of a central theme of whether the gender of prosecutors and defenders in alleged and actual sex crimes has an impact on judges, juries, and even expert witnesses. Pike often makes Jessica endearing, notably in memories of law school sexual fumbling with a counsel who appears in her court at the start of the play. And the social stabs at the high-level London dinner party circuit always find their mark without appearing gratuitous or spiteful.
But I’m less happy with the form. With the text in front of me, I note how Miller tells us that when Pike’s character is in dialogue with the other people that she conjures up (not her husband and son) she voices internal and external narrative. And even with her family, she is able to spell out stage directions in which she describes people’s movement around the set when this can’t be acted out. And she can speak her internal thoughts while she is with Michael and Harry without them hearing her. It strikes me as wilful disregard of the “show not tell” advice that Miller would surely have received when she studied for a film master’s in New South Wales.
The format appears a little lazy and rather like playing tennis with the net down. If this is a politically driven exercise in box-ticking then it’s still a thoughtful, provocative, and often amusing project. And there may well be many woman judges in criminal and family courts who are making decisions that have been optimized by what Jessica calls “soft, womanly skills” that go beyond the cruder judgments of “puffed up public schoolboys”. I just wonder whether Miller might be better off focusing some of this concern about convictions and sentencing protocol into long-form articles for leading magazines. She should certainly be looking for another kind of canvas for her next play.
On 4 September, a performance of “Inter Alia” will be captured live from the Lyttelton stage and broadcast to cinemas across the UK and Ireland. “Inter Alia” will have additional screenings in cinemas in the UK/Ireland from 18 September and internationally from 25 September.
