Inter Alia West End review – Rosamund Pike is supreme in a well-judged performance

The transfer of Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia from the National Theatre to the West End gives a larger audience a chance to witness Rosamund Pike’s exhilarating performance as Jessica Parks, a judge and a juggler, a woman who has reached the top of her profession while spinning the plates of her domestic life.

It’s a role many women – whether in the legal profession or not – will instantly recognise. Pike as Parks cooks a dinner for 16 while holding forth on the bench, while her husband Michael (Jamie Glover), a smoothly satisfied criminal barrister only slightly resentful of his wife’s success, provides the cheese. Which he has ordered. Their son Harry (Cormac McAlinden) is studying for A-levels and trying to conform to his mother’s demands of him and to fit in with his peers. But still finding time to make 18 calls to his mother because he can’t find a shirt.

Where Miller introduces an element of jeopardy is that Jessica presides over cases of rape and criminal assault, trying with compassion to the women and strictness to the men to balance the inherent unfairness of the justice system towards the victims of such crimes – which usually boil down to one woman’s testimony against one man’s. When an accusation of assault is made against one of the men in her life, Jessica’s carefully constructed walls between home and work come crashing down. She begins to realise that a legal victory is different from a moral one.

The opening line of the play is “F**k the patriarchy”, and part of the cleverness of Miller’s writing and the intelligence of Pike’s performance is that, beneath that confident pride in her achievements, her sense that she is taking on the male establishment and winning, Jessica is ignoring the complexity of a world that is shifting beneath her feet. Her assertive feminism, her belief that she is a good judge, both publicly and privately, is suddenly challenged and revealed to be delusional.

All of this is beautifully conveyed by Miriam Buether’s slippery set, which moves seamlessly between home and courtroom, with drawers and cupboards always ready to swallow the objects Pike is holding – Marigold gloves, a sensuous cocktail dress, a legal wig, a pinny – and which is surrounded by lurking darkness.

It is in this space that Jessica loses sight of her son, represented by puppets and by live children, covered in a yellow oilskin, an image of vulnerability in a world she seeks to control. Justin Martin’s direction, full of verve and energy, preserves this sense of rising panic as deep, dark truths are revealed.

As Harry, McAlinden (in the one change to the cast since its premiere) perfectly conveys teenage confusion; he is both bolshie and innocent, loving towards his mother and resentful of the way she seeks to control his life. Glover, too, is impressive. But both parts are underwritten, and the interludes where they play drums and guitar together, often accompanying Pike’s ruminations, are oddly unconvincing. Nothing we see suggests this sort of intimacy.

It is Pike’s play and Pike’s night, and she seizes it with such relish, whether belting out a karaoke number and downing shots with the girls before getting in a taxi exhausted at 9pm, or facing her worst fears of failure as a wife and mother. She is supremely witty and sharp, but also devastatingly exposed and tender.

Inter Alia, coming so soon after Miller’s previous triumph with Prima Facie, a play that is essentially a companion piece to this one, raises important questions about the legal system, about what we ask women to do, but also about the huge gulf of understanding between men and women that society conveniently ignores. It is slick (perhaps too much so) and entertaining, but also has the courage of its convictions in the questions it raises. It deserves this wider viewing.