Theatre review: Inter Alia

Playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin's next collaboration after Prima Facie has a lot to live up to after the earlier play's international success; but in fairness the publicity for Inter Alia has leaned heavily on that connection, and this is another story told by a powerful woman in the legal system, with a Latin legal term as its title, so it's not like the comparisons aren't being enthusiastically invited. This time the narrator is a judge: Jessica (Rosamund Pike) has been in the position for a couple of years now and is settled into a role that, as she often tells us, requires a lot less talking and a lot more listening than her previous job as a barrister. She enjoys the wider perspective she now has as well as the fresh approach she feels she brings to the bench, even if she has to contend with barristers who show her less respect than her male colleagues.

The job has also caused tensions back at home, and she's still walking on eggshells around her husband as Michael (Jamie Glover) has barely made any effort to conceal the fact that he resents her promotion, and thinks he should have got it before or instead of her.

But Pike's high-speed delivery uses Jessica and her family's love of music and karaoke to show she sees herself as a kind of legal rock star, firmly but fairly shutting down counsels who manipulate juries and bend the rules, while using her judgment and experience to get fair results in harrowing cases such as rape trials - notoriously hard to get a conviction in, she likes to make an example of those perpetrators who do get found guilty.

If there's one big weakness to Inter Alia it's that this setup very clearly gives away where the story is going, but Miller takes too long actually getting us to the moment where the rug gets pulled out from under Jessica: She has a teenage son, Harry (Jasper Talbot,) so when early on she expresses sympathy for the mother of a convicted rapist, counting her as another female victim of the crime, we know she's going to get a call about what happened at a party where he came back with a scratch on his face.

So the fact that it takes a little over half the running time for this to happen means we're left waiting for the other shoe to drop throughout the time we're getting to know Jessica and her family. But that aside the show is hard to fault - the opening hour is breathlessly entertaining with a lot of funny lines and a gleefully open performance from Pike, who enjoys playing the rock star judge before things get significantly darker and she has to take her into much more devastating territory - Ben was moved to tears by the unfolding story.

For me the most impressive elements were those where Miller and Martin took turns you don't often see: Harry is a rather lumbering, awkward teenager with anxiety issues, so when he initially tells them that people are saying things about him online, his parents assume he's the victim of bullying like he was as a child. But once the police charge him, most stories like this would see Jessica turn from fierce defender of believing the victim to refusing to accept her son's guilt, but Miller has her genuinely, and in a nuanced way, conflicted between her roles as mother and judge (Michael, meanwhile, turns out to be more or less convinced of Harry's guilt and immediately picking holes in the victim's story.)

The story is also told in an unusual way - it's rooted in a monologue, with Jessica directly addressing the audience and taking on other characters, except for Michael and Harry whose scenes we see play out more naturalistically, allowing us to make our own personal connection with them before events take a turn. More often than not when a show takes on a structure like this that's neither one thing nor the other it can turn messy, but Inter Alia manages to make the flips in style smooth. The video projections by Willie Williams for Treatment Studio are so sparingly used I wasn't convinced they served any purpose at all* but Miriam Buether's set design is one of those that effectively uses the Lyttelton's size to expand into a bigger - and scarier - world. The show might have leaned into its own hype, but its confidence turns out to be justified.

Inter Alia by Suzie Miller is booking until the 13th of September at the National Theatre's Lyttelton (returns and rush tickets only.)

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*in fact I had a suspicion they might have been malfunctioning tonight, but if so the performance wasn't stopped to fix them