Rosamund Pike’s Devastating Triumph is a Judicial Unraveling, in Suzie Miller’s Gripping INTER ALIA. There is a moment in Suzie Miller’s formidable new play, INTER ALIA, at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton stage, where the very architecture of power begins to crumble. It is not a physical collapse, but a psychological and moral one, masterfully engineered by director Justin Martin and realised in a career-defining performance by Rosamund Pike. For two relentless, intermission-less hours, the play conducts a high-voltage assault on the senses and the intellect, holding a cracked mirror up to the legal system, modern motherhood, and the precarious scaffolding of privilege that upholds it all. While some may level criticisms of heavy-handedness, to do so is to mistake the play’s deliberate, potent urgency for a lack of subtlety. INTER ALIA is not a whispered debate; it is a scream from the heart of a system in crisis, and it is one of the most vital, compelling productions on the London stage.
Highly Recommended. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
All three actors, are perfectly cast in their roles. The title itself, is a Latin legal term meaning “among other things”, is Miller’s first masterstroke. It signals a story that is about the specific case at hand, but also, insidiously, about everything else: the unspoken biases, the personal histories, the societal rot that seeps into the supposedly sterile arena of the courtroom. Our guide through this moral quagmire is Jessica (Rosamund Pike), a High Court judge at the pinnacle of her profession. She is a woman who has mastered the world she inhabits; she speaks its language, wears its uniform (the horsehair wig a crown of authority), and wields its power with a confident, almost effortless precision. She is the system, and the system is her. Thought that Rosamund Pike was spectacular, energetic, all singing and dancing, and she brought every emotion possible to the role. Really enjoyed the great and timely story, about women working in male dominated areas, plus detailing mothers’ worst guilt, from balancing home / work life and the big ethical / moral issues of rape / consent.
From the moment we meet her, Rosamund Pike embodies this authority with a chilling authenticity. Her voice, crisp and measured, can slice through air. Her posture is ramrod straight, a figure carved from legal precedent and unassailable conviction. She believes in the process, in the beautiful, cold logic of the law. It is a belief so deeply ingrained it is a part of her musculature. This makes her impending unraveling not just dramatic, but truly tragic.
The catalyst for this unravelling is a case that lands on her desk. A young man stands accused of a brutal, senseless act of violence. The details are murky, the evidence circumstantial, but the victim’s trauma is horrifyingly clear. As Jessica pores over the files, the walls of her world, ever so meticulously built and maintained, do begin to prove porous. The case echoes with a terrifying, personal resonance. Her own teenage son, Josh, is struggling, displaying flashes of a sullen, alien anger she cannot comprehend. The confident legalese she uses in court becomes useless at the dinner table. The respect commanded by her robes evaporates in the face of adolescent defiance.
Miller’s script is brilliantly structured to facilitate this collision. Miriam Buether’s stunning set design is a character in itself, a technical and metaphorical marvel. The Lyttelton stage is transformed into an evolving space, where the professional and the domestic don’t just coexist, instead they violently intrude upon one another. The imposing mahogany and leather of the judge’s bench swivels to reveal the sleek, cold modernity of her minimalist kitchen. The stark, fluorescent lights of the courtroom (part of Natasha Chivers’s exceptional lighting design) bleed into the warmer, but no less exposing, lighting of her home. A legal submission left on the bench in one scene appears on the kitchen island in the next. The effect is disorienting, claustrophobic, and utterly genius. There is no escape. The gavel’s echo follows her home; the simmering tension of her family life sits in the public gallery, watching her every move on the bench.
This blurring is the core of the play’s power. We see Jessica deliver a razor-sharp legal summation on the standards of proof, only for the set to revolve and find her using the same tone of voice to ask her son if he’s done his homework. The dissonance is jarring. The language of justice becomes the language of maternal nagging, and both are rendered inadequate. Buether and Chivers create a palpable sense of danger, a feeling that the ground is constantly shifting beneath Jessica’s feet—and by extension, our own. The courtroom is no longer a hallowed hall of truth but a panopticon; the home is no longer a sanctuary but a crime scene of failed communication and mounting dread.
At the centre of this meticulously constructed storm is Rosamund Pike, giving a performance of such raw, forceful intensity that it threatens to burn itself into your memory. To call it a tour de force feels almost insufficient. This is a deep, psychological excavation of a woman watching her own identity dissolve. Rosamund Pike’s command of the stage is absolute. In her early scenes, she is all icy control, her face a mask of judicial impartiality. Rosamund Pike lets us see, the tiny fissures first: a barely perceptible tremor in her hand as she sips water, a fleeting shadow of doubt in her eyes, as she listens to testimony that hits too close to home.
The mask doesn’t just slip; it shatters. Her transformation is devastating to witness. The crisp cadence of her speech fractures into ragged breaths and panicked outbursts. The erect posture crumples into the desperate curl of a foetal position on the cold kitchen floor. Rosamund Pike masterfully portrays the terror of a rational mind confronting the irrational, of a woman who has built her life on knowing the right answer suddenly realizing there isn’t one. Her performance is not a slow decline but a series of seismic ruptures, each one more powerful than the last. She is by turns formidable, fragile, arrogant, and achingly vulnerable. It is a privilege to watch an actor of her calibre grapple with such a complex role, and she owns the stage with a magnetic, terrifying grace.
The play’s themes are not just relevant; they are urgent. Miller uses Jessica’s crisis to launch a multifaceted attack on the failings of the criminal justice system, particularly regarding toxic masculinity and the treatment of victims. The courtroom scenes are not just background; they are the engine of the play’s moral argument. We see how the law, in its quest for objective truth, can often traumatise again, and how cross-examination can feel like a second assault. Jessica, from her privileged perch, has always been shielded from this reality. Now, through the lens of her fear for her son, both as a potential victim of a system she knows too well, and as a potential perpetrator of an act she cannot fathom, she is forced to see the machine from the inside out.
The exploration of motherhood is equally incisive. Miller dissects the impossible pressures of modern parenting, the “performance lecture” society expects from mothers. Jessica is judged for being too distant, too career-focused, too cold. Could her professional success be the cause of her son’s distress? The play pointedly asks these questions, without offering easy answers, implicating the audience in the same snap judgments we witness on stage. A searing look at the guilt, the fear, and the terrifying powerlessness, that comes with loving someone you can no longer protect or understand.
The supporting characters of the husband and the son, both serving more as catalysts and foils, than as fully realised individuals. The husband is the concerned, slightly bewildered partner, the son a conduit for adolescent angst and male rage. INTER ALIA is not a balanced family drama, and has expressionist, almost nightmarish qualities, with this psychological thriller, unfolding from just one woman’s perspective. The world is distorting around her. The other people in her life become blurry, their outlines fuzzy because her own focus is turning so intensely inward. They are less characters and more emotional functions, being the source of her fear, the symbol of a life that she is failing to maintain. In this context, their relative thinness feels less like an oversight and more like a deliberate stylistic choice, to plunge us entirely into Jessica’s disintegrating subjective experience.
Justin Martin’s direction is a lesson in sophisticated, dynamic staging. He masterfully controls the play’s rhythm, which is relentlessly paced, mimicking the accelerating spiral of Jessica’s anxiety. The transitions between scenes are seamless, the revolve of the set used not as a gimmick but as a narrative tool that constantly disorientates and also re-contextualises. Martin understands the power of silence and space, allowing Rosamund Pike’s most devastating moments to hang in the air, uninterrupted. Orchestrating the entire production like a symphony of unease, where the score, the lighting, the set, and the performance are all in perfect harmony.
The play INTER ALIA has an understandable, but ultimately different viewpoint, than as delivered within Miller’s previous smash-hit, PRIMA FACIE. While both plays feature one high-achieving legal professional, that is undergoing a crisis of faith in the system, their angles of attack are fundamentally different. PRIMA FACIE was a visceral story from the perspective of a victim, a blistering indictment of the system’s failure to handle female victims of sexual assault. INTER ALIA is a complex, uncomfortable story from the perspective of the powerful, the judge who is complicit in that very system. INTER ALIA asks an important but equally complicated question, so what happens when those who wield the gavel, finally hear events echo into their own lives? A much trickier, and more morally ambiguous proposition, and Miller deserves credit for not simply repeating a winning formula, but for challenging her audience from a new, equally provocative vantage point.
INTER ALIA is not a comfortable night at the theatre. It is designed to unsettle, to provoke, and to disturb. It leaves you with more questions than answers, and that is its greatest strength. As the lights fade on Jessica’s shattered figure, the play refuses tidy resolution. The system grinds on, imperfect and impersonal, but the human beings within it are left permanently scarred.
This unique play, will ignite discussions on the walk back to the parking plaza, talking over dinner, and long into the night. This play holds a microscope to the phrase “blind justice” and asks what it truly means to see. Thanks to a visionary production, a script that crackles with moral urgency, and a central performance from Rosamund Pike that is nothing short of legendary, INTER ALIA is a monumental achievement. Gripping, disturbing, and profoundly important piece of theatre that doesn’t just hold a mirror up to nature, because it takes the mirror and smashes it at your feet, forcing you to examine every sharp, glittering piece.
WARNING: This film contains flickering and/or flashing lights that may affect those with photosensitive epilepsy.
TRIGGER WARNING: This production contains references to sensitive subject matter including sex, violence, rape, and other criminal activity.
“In the queue at PRET” translates as “Pret A Manger” (means “ready to eat” in the French Language) and since 1986 is a British coffee and sandwich shop food franchise, now with 434 shops nationwide.
Production Photography by
INFORMATION – https://interalia.ntlive.com/synopsis/
UK WEBSITE – https://interalia.ntlive.com/
FAQ – https://www.ntlive.com/about-us/
AU DISTRIBUTORS – https://sharmillfilms.com.au/interalia/
UK DISTRIBUTORS – https://interalia.ntlive.com/
STARRING – The Cast –
Michael Wheatley – Jamie Glover
Jessica Parks – Rosamund Pike
Harry Wheatley – Jasper Talbot
Ensemble – Louisa Clein
Ensemble – Luke Garner-Greene
Ensemble – Thomas Michaelson
Children – Esma Akar
Children – Liliana Argenio-Winch
Children – Edward Butler
Children – Ella Critchell
Children – Charles Dark
Children – Ayrton English
CREATIVES – The Production Team –
Writer – Suzie Miller
Director – Justin Martin
Set and Costume Designer – Miriam Buether
Lighting Designer – Natasha Chivers
Movement and Intimacy Director – Lucy Hind
Composers – Erin LeCount, James Jacob – PKA Jakwob
Music Director – Nick Pinchbeck
Sound Designers – Ben and Max Ringham
Video Designer – Willie Williams for Treatment Studio.
PLAY DURATION 109 minutes – Total running time of 109 minutes, and NO interval and there are NO pre-show extras. Suzie Miller’s new play, INTER ALIA at the National Theatre.
AUSTRALIAN CLASSIFICATION RATING is CTC but probably E – Exempt from classification.
PDF-DOWNLOAD – CAST-SHEET – CAST-LIST –
VIDEO – NT Live: INTER ALIA – Official Trailer (AU)
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZ_yytVCCY&
Hear from Suzie Miller, the writer, on what it is
to be a judge, with this excerpt from the INTER ALIA programme.
“The Latin words ‘inter alia’ means ‘among
other things’, and it is a term used in the legal
profession, but here it is also emblematic
of how working women juggle their lives.
Women work exceptionally hard at their
jobs ‘among other things’, those ‘other
things’ include having to: juggle their
family lives, carry the ‘emotional load’,
manage households, and be available
for emergencies. As one woman told me,
she lives her own life ‘in the cracks of
everyone else’s lives’ while she attempts
to work, organise school costumes,
lunches, meals, school drop offs and
manage tradespeople who need to come
to the house. There are so many invisible
lines and boundaries that women must
negotiate between motherhood, marriage,
professional lives and being women
in society. The overlap and competing
expectations are challenging at best
and often overwhelming. For women
generally there is another layer, the
social judgement of women trying to
manage it all. Jessica’s character is
a ‘judge’ but so too is the character of
Jessica being judged: for her parenting,
her choices, her work hours, her
femininity, her feminism, her role as a life
partner, and more. Like so many women
trying to meet so many competing
demands, Jessica also judges herself.”
