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All rise for Rosamund Pike, reprising her stunning performance as Crown Court judge Jess Parks, frantically juggling family and social life with work, and finding that the toxic masculinity she so often confronts in the dock has taken root in her own home.
Suzie Miller’s physically challenging, hard-hitting but witty play marked a triumphant return to the London stage for Pike after 15 years away when it was staged at the National last year. This transfer feels slightly tighter, the ending tweaked and the architecture of a West End playhouse pulling the story and Pike’s bravura central turn into closer focus.
The actress is a whirlwind as Jess faces down defendants, mounts a lavish dinner party, lets rip at a girls’ karaoke night, and even engages in a marital sex scene – in which her husband’s midlife crisis guitar acts as a phallic prop - that manages to be both erotic and painfully awkward.
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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 clothese iron spurting steam becomes a stand-in for her bumptious barrister husband.
Jess is first seen wigged and gowned, yowling into a microphone like a rockstar standup, as legal phrases flash on flanking gauze screens and a guitarist and drummer (later revealed as her husband and son) thrash behind her. Miller, who also wrote the legal monologue Prima Facie that brought Jodie Comer back to the theatre, was a lawyer in the past, and exaggerates the performative nature of court proceedings to immediately compelling effect.
The show is directed with brio, as Prima Facie was, by Justin Martin. Miriam Buether’s set alternates between the abstract courtroom, the kind of desirable open-plan home that two legal salaries can buy, and a murky wood behind. The latter suggests an Eden-like idyll, but not everything in this garden is lovely. Innocence – legal and moral – is fleeting.
Jess is always aware of her audience: theatrically stern when slapping down sexist male lawyers; gung-ho but supportive with other high-flying legal women; at home, carefully stepping around the sensibilities of her intimacy-averse 18-year-old son Harry (Cormac McAlinden(YES)) and the ego of her husband Michael (Jamie Glover) who she’s beaten onto the bench.
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Jess has done all the emotional lifting in Harry’s childhood, the little boy evoked through a series of yellow anoraks and occasionally a child actor. We feel her fear of pedophile abduction when he goes briefly missing, her fury when he’s bullied at school, her excruciating embarrassment when having the first “porn chat” with him aged 12, including the symbolic use of a large pepper grinder. Her protective sense of him as a potential victim shifts into something more troubling when he’s accused of assault at a party by a girl.
Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia deals with the fact that the system remains rigged against women, particularly the legal system, where convictions for rape and sexual assault are rare and victim-blaming common. And as with the earlier play, the price of Miller’s insider information is the occasional impenetrable thicket of legalese. She and Martin are adroit, though, at sudden shifts of mood, from comedy into something stark.
Glover, who also played Michael at the National, brings great power to the scene where the cocksure father realises his potential culpability in his son’s attitude to women. McAlinden, who has taken over his role from Jasper Talbot, brings a shambling awkwardness to Harry, as if this man-boy isn’t fully in control of his own body.
The two men provide sterling support but it’s Pike’s night - a triumphant, freewheeling turn from an actress at the height of her powers. No further questions, your honour.
Booking to 20 June, wyndhamstheatre.co.uk.
