7 days ago
Rosamund Pike is riveting in theatre's spin on Adolescence
Boasting the triumphant return of Rosamund Pike to the stage after 15 screen-dominated years away, Inter Alia is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Prima Facie from Australian lawyer-turned-playwright Suzie Miller. That phenomenal one-woman play about sexual assault, consent and the failings of the criminal justice system was an award-winning tour de force for Jodie Comer in the West End in 2022 and then on Broadway.
Inter Alia has a lot in common with its agenda-setting predecessor: aside from its title being another Latin legal term and Justin Martin directing again, the play revisits the emotive subject of sexual offences and how the law works, only this time involving teenagers. It grips, too, and is gut-wrenching, but in comparison feels sketchier.
Comer played a top-flight barrister whose confidence in herself and the law takes a battering following a sexual assault that finds her experiencing the legal system from the other side. Here, Pike plays Jessica, a high-powered Crown Court judge whose desire to see better treatment and outcomes for female sexual assault victims runs up against the mother of all agonised upsets on the home-front, when her own 18-year-old son stands accused of rape following a boozy party.
Once again, the piece calls for a transfixing, shape-shifting performance from its star, and the hurtling 105-minute action showcases Pike's theatrical bravura. She can hold a stage as vast as the Lyttelton with immaculate assurance. But where Prima Facie was a full-on monologue, here we also see the characters closest to Jessica – her husband Michael (Jamie Glover), a successful, competitive silk himself, and shy, troubled son Harry (Jasper Talbot). That enlargement of scope is a mixed blessing. Where the comparable Netflix hit Adolescence got under the skin of 'toxic masculinity', what comes across here is a palpable sense of maternal helplessness but also a lack of insight into what's really going on with her child.
When we first see Pike's heroine, she rises up on a platform in wig and gowns, with a mic in hand, striking the attitude of a rock star, the swaggering, tongue-in-cheek touch augmented by accompaniment on guitar and drums (a skulking Glover and Talbot). That poise – evidence of her courtroom command – comes under pressure from her multi-tasking requirements as a mother. Diving in and out of different clothes, Pike is coolly efficient, wryly confiding and forever pulled in different directions (Miriam Buether's set conjuring legal realm, affluent kitchen and darker hinterlands). Her hurried lifestyle – with darting evocations of Harry's childhood too as she broods over past parenting – can seem entertainingly frenetic but the overload has had a cost; the online world has become Harry's surrogate shaping influence.
Glover and Talbot bring a brusque reticence and contrasting despair to their roles but the script positions them almost as peripheral. As more information is revealed, our sympathies shift – and that takes in Jessica herself; caught between knowing how the legal system works, how it should work, and her own protective instincts as a mother.
She's sent into a freefall, anguish and self-recrimination memorably etched on Pike's face. I suspect a lot of parents will identify with the scenario: the peril of complacency, the dread of catastrophe. And if the evening stirs debate about how one generation guides the next, how men should behave and how the culture can foster respect, safety and justice for women, it's all to the good. Whether it will have the same impact of Prima Facie is open to question.
Until Sept 13. Tickets:
