Rosamund Pike is riveting in Inter Alia at the National Theatre

Rosamund Pike gives a hectic, vital, riveting performance at the centre of Suzie Miller’s gut-punch of a play, as a judge, Jess Parks, who discovers that the toxic masculinity she sees in the courtroom has taken root in her own home.

Onstage and constantly in motion for an uninterrupted 105 minutes she slips in and out of robes and stylish off-duty wear, faces down pompous barristers (including her own husband) and mounts a raucous dinner party, irons shirts and lets loose at girls’ night karaoke. All while keeping up an amused, complicit commentary for us on how her gender impacts her professional and personal life.

Inter Alia shares DNA as well as a title drawn from Latin legalese with Miller’s previous play, Prima Facie, a monologue for Jodie Comer as a lawyer adept at defending accused rapists who is herself then raped. Both are urgent dispatches about sexual violence and the structures that enable it. Both are showcases for an actress at the top of her game. Justin Martin again directs here, with kinetic verve. Both plays are a little schematic and necessarily enmeshed in the nuances of the legal world (Miller was a lawyer before she was a writer). Both pack a powerful, sobering punch.

Rosamund Pike (Jessica) in Inter Alia (Manuel Harlan)

But Inter Alia feels like a more mature work: it features an older character with different challenges, adds the pressures of motherhood into the mix, and breaks out of the monologue form. It opens with Jess, in wig and gown beneath a neon crest, extemporizing like a freestyling performance poet into a microphone about a courtroom contretemps, while legal clichés flash on screens either side of her and a drummer and guitarist thrash behind.

These turn out to be Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot, who play Jess’s husband Michael and son Harry once Miriam Buether’s abstract courtroom design is swapped for the sort of lavish kitchen-diner-lounge that two legal incomes can buy. Michael is an alpha manchild who leaves the heavy lifting of life to his wife but is mutedly jealous of her elevation to the bench. His guitar becomes a symbolic prop in a hurried sex scene between the two, which is funny and then suddenly not — a twist of mood at which Miller excels.

Jasper Talbot (Harry) and Jamie Glover (Michael) in Inter Alia (Manuel Harlan)

Talbot’s Harry is 18, shruggy and surly, and looks like a young Malcom McDowell. Pike, with the help of a series of yellow child’s anoraks and sometimes with a child actor, evokes his earlier selves. She powerfully captures the emotions that go with losing him at four in a playground, of wanting to protect him from pedophiles and bullies and mean girls, and with having the first “porn chat” with him at 12. Here, again, Miller combines ribald humour with a looming sense of menace. Having a boy is like having a ticking time bomb.

The play demands you keep your eyes on Jess and Pike’s performance more than earns the attention. From her breakout role as a Bond girl and her stage debut in Hitchcock Blonde, both in 2002, she has grown into a performer of great nuance and depth, where a flicker of feeling across her eyes speaks volumes.

Miller’s play suggests things may not have moved on as far for women as we’d have hoped, and in some ways have gotten worse. It provides a rich, contemporary female role at a time when London theatre seems to be looking at women and their agency over the last 100-plus years. We’re pretty damned lucky to be alive at a time when Pike, Ruth Wilson, Samira Wiley and Rachel Zegler are all on stage across the capital and knocking it out of the park.

Inter Alia at the National Theatre, until September 13, tickets and information here.