Review Roundup: Suzie Miller's INTER ALIA Transfers to The West End

Jessica Parks is a maverick London Crown Court Judge; sharp, compassionate, and determined to change a system she knows isn’t always just. But her career exists inter alia (‘among other things’) as she balances motherhood, friendship and the elusive notion of ‘having it all’.

So, when an unthinkable event rocks her finely tuned life, can she hold her family together – or will everything fall apart? Rosamund Pike returns to Suzie Miller's explosive second play-what did the critics think?

Inter Alia plays at the Wyndham's Theatre until 20 June

Photo credits: Manuel Harlan

Clementine Scott, BroadwayWorld: Pike is an inherently physical performer, and flaws in the script are glossed over by her constant bounding around the set, morphing from courtroom gravitas to dinner party femininity and back again. Though Glover and McAlinden do get revealing character moments towards the end of the play, this is effectively a one-woman show – an extended monologue, in which Pike lays bare Jessica's powers of observation and hypervigilance about factors outside her control.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: 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.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: The opening line of the play is “F**k the patriarchy”, and part of the cleverness of Miller’s writing and the intelligence of Pike’s performance is that, beneath that confident pride in her achievements, her sense that she is taking on the male establishment and winning, Jessica is ignoring the complexity of a world that is shifting beneath her feet. Her assertive feminism, her belief that she is a good judge, both publicly and privately, is suddenly challenged and revealed to be delusional.

Olivia Rook, London Theatre: The personal and the professional bleed into one another. Miriam Buether’s set design shows how Jessica’s home life encroaches on her working life, as the huge set piece of the perfectly co-ordinated lime green family kitchen slowly rolls into view to fill the entire stage (and later breaks apart as she discovers Harry’s troubling internet search history), while two small closets are hidden in the wings to represent her chambers. Pike is constantly picking up court wigs, silk dresses, pyjamas, and even an apron styled like a judge’s robes as she nimbly jumps between these two parts of Jessica’s life. Her performance is perfectly judged.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: Onstage throughout, Pike is in constant motion, slipping in and out of outfits, catching a casually flung lemon, and keeping up a sometimes amused, sometimes emotionally frayed commentary for the audience on how her gender affects her life. The role plays to her dramatic skills but also a flair for physical comedy, as when a clothes iron spurting steam becomes a stand-in for her bumptious barrister husband.

Clive Davis, The Times: It is 17 years since Rosamund Pike last appeared in the West End. Films such as Gone Girl and Saltburn have distracted her from the stage. But seeing her rule over Wyndham’s Theatre with the loose-limbed aplomb she does in this reprise of Inter Alia, the legal-meets-personal drama in which she triumphed at the National Theatre last summer, you cannot help hoping this isn’t a one-off. Will she win an Olivier award on Sunday for the National production? She certainly deserves it. This is acting at its best.

Holly O'Mahony , The Stage: The play breathlessly unpicks its knotty moral conundrum, packaged in a style that grates. Pike’s Jess Parks is narrator as well as main character, and she describes her situation (high-flying career woman diminished to a doormat at home) and the events that befall her family (18-year-old son Harry gets accused of something life-shatteringly terrible) with so much exposition that it never scorches as it might.

Average Rating: 80.0%