Review: INTER ALIA, Starring Rosamund Pike, Wyndham's Theatre

In Prima Facie, former lawyer and playwright Suzie Miller wrote about a lawyer whose faith in her profession is shaken by an experience of sexual assault. Now in Inter Alia, which transfers to the West End after an acclaimed National Theatre run, she exposes the limits of the justice system when it comes to sexual violence through a different lens: that of a mother of a son immersed in the manosphere.

Rosamund Pike reprises her role as Jessica Parks, a pioneering judge known for taking a hard line in court against ‘rape myths’ – ‘her outfit was asking for it’, ‘she’s lying to get attention’, and the like. While the lead in Prima Facie questioned her rigid ‘innocent until proven guilty’ approach to defending abusers, Jessica instead questions how far she is willing to believe and protect victims, when her son Harry (played with lolloping nonchalance by recent drama school graduate Cormac McAlinden) is accused of rape by a classmate.

To present this as purely a legal drama would be inaccurate. Miller’s script takes its time developing Jessica as a character and her family’s dynamics before we ever hear about the allegations against her son, which only emerge fully after the halfway mark. The result is a portrait of Jessica’s chameleon-like life as judge and mother, and of how working on sexual abuse cases as a parent inevitably leads to paranoia about the fate of one’s child; an actor playing Harry’s younger self shadows Jessica like a ghost in a cute yellow anorak.

One unfortunate side effect of this measured pacing, though, is that the ideological forces Harry has been exposed to feel hinted at but underexplored. Jessica learns of objectifying comments about women’s bodies left by Harry on social media, but while unacceptable, these hardly plumb the depths of online misogyny explored in Adolescence and Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere. A later speech from Jessica’s husband (Jamie Glover, who strikes the balance of good intentions and cluelessness perfectly) about the pressures facing contemporary young men might twist the knife more sharply if we knew more about what those pressures might be.

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.

Sceptics might have wondered how some of the production’s crucial visual effects would translate from the vast Lyttelton Theatre at the National to the more compact Wyndham’s. Justin Martin’s direction might be slightly restricted in this space, but there’s also a certain claustrophobia to the rock concert staging of Jessica’s scenes in court – the drums are pulsating just a few feet behind her – and to set designer Miriam Buether’s carefully constructed domestic idyll. The effect is of a woman feeling the walls slowly closing in around her.

Inter Alia has garnered, and will continue to garner, the label ‘thought-provoking’, but it does more than simply present ethical dilemmas. At its heart is a compelling character study of a woman forced to be everything at once, anchored by Pike, a clear favourite to win the Best Actress Olivier this Sunday.

Inter Alia plays at Wyndham's Theatre until 20 June

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