Inter Alia ★★★

Nominated for the Olivier award for Best New Play, Inter Alia has already had a spectacular run at the National Theatre in 2025, starring Rosamund Pike as Jessica Parks: a London Crown Court Judge, feminist trailblazer and neurotic mother. ‘Inter Alia’ is a Latin legal term meaning ‘amongst other things’, and it’s true that Parks’ career exists amongst other pressing, domestic issues. The play offers a narrated exploration of multi-generational relationships, specifically how to parent a boy raised on the internet – a breeding ground for misogyny that many parents feel out of touch with. Nominated for Best Actress, Rosamund Pike takes on Wyndham’s Theatre in a truly athletic performance.

This drama begins with a bang. Rock music blasts through the theatre, Jamie Glover (Michael Wheatley) and Cormac McAlinden (Harry Wheatley) play live guitar and drums behind Pike. She enters in a Freddie Mercury pose, raised through the trap door with a microphone to her mouth, dressed in full Judge gear. She hesitantly screams about patriarchy while tame liberal feminist slogans flash too quickly across two big screens, never to be used again. Unfortunately, this is about as radical as Miller’s writing really gets in terms of its themes.

Jessica Parks is witty, but flawed enough to be a believable protagonist. She’s an upper-middle class mother who juggles doing her job, housework and raising a child. As she hops and races around Miriam Buether’s restrictive and clunky set, she frantically retells stories of her own feminist action in the workplace and in her parenting. It’s clear she’s done her best to raise a feminist son, but she is overwhelmed by responsibility that her husband never absolves her of. This is a tragedy in itself. Jessica’s character speaks to working mothers humorously – think Motherland sitcom moments. The issue is that nobody is really punching up here. When nobody counters the imperfect protagonist, it’s hard to like her if you can’t directly relate to her. This play caters to older and wealthier audiences despite its attempts at deciphering the younger generation.

In the first half, Jessie comically manages her hectic life. The halfway point brings a huge tonal shift to the emotional and vulnerable, but the pace is still that of a farce. As Jessie tries to do her job, getting justice for victims of domestic violence and rape, she is ironically unaware of the monster she has raised. At the point of climax, her son, Harry, gets accused and charged with rape; everybody argues it can’t be true. By the end, he confesses to his mother. Without Pike even leaving a beat for this huge revelation to sit in the air, Jessie’s morals take a full 180, and she commands him to lie under oath and plead not guilty. She echoes the words of her patriarchal husband, telling Harry he’s ‘morally guilty, legally, not’. This moment could have been so powerful, but this quick pace and odd character choice causes a reflexive eye-roll and undoes all previous attempts to create a feminist play. So when her world caves in, it’s hard to sympathise. On paper, Inter Alia is a brave concept that brings up a plethora of interesting talking points, but in action, it feels more like an amalgamation of feminist buzzwords and modern tragedy with no real solution or catharsis.

Inter Alia shares a director with Prima Facie too, Justin Martin, and it’s fair to say that some scenes with the family really stand out for their quick conversational wit. When the boys join Pike on stage, it’s a far more exciting play. But Jamie Glover and Cormac McAlinden seem to have no more than walk-ons and a bit of dialogue, until they both have separate breakdowns, usually all narrated by Pike anyway. With little depth to these peripheral characters, it’s incredibly tough to navigate this material. The choice to almost commit to a one-woman narrative is unfortunate; it feels increasingly monotonous, and you just ache for another flowing conversation. Asides and narration are effective in the fast-paced first half; it feels like a witty Fleabag effect, but when the play shifts to something far more serious, this outward monologuing isn’t accompanied by anything substantial enough (thematically or theatrically) to be engaging. In order to squeeze the most from Miller’s script, you must do as much concentrating as Pike does, trying to remember all those lines.

This being said, she of course has standout moments of her own, she commands the stage very well and lands a fair amount of laughs – at one point she explains consent to her toddler charmingly. However, the whole play (1 hour 40 with no interval) is too frantic – so much that it feels like everybody is exhausted by the end of it, Pike included. The constant chaos really doesn’t help the tonal shift in the second half; there are only so many times you can get away with running around the set, shouting, to signify a character’s desperation. And something about the frequency of Pike’s soliloquies and costume changes becomes distracting and predictable by the end. It’s a shame to say that Inter Alia’s frenetic nature dilutes Miller’s feminism – it just gets lost alongside an already busy stage and plot. In this case, one wonders if less is more.

When you search it up, Inter Alia is marketed as a feminist legal drama, but poses the question ‘can [Jessica Parks] hold her family together – or will everything fall apart?’. From this alone, it’s hard to decipher what this play is actually offering. Plus, ‘holding the family together’ would require defending a rapist, ‘everything falling apart’ would mean sending your son rightfully to prison, so does the marketing of this play actually match its feminist agenda? From the website’s synopsis and at £253 a seat, you’d be forgiven for expecting a juicy family drama, but what Miller offers is, at best, a mild tap into modern feminist issues from one unrelatable character’s POV. So, in terms of success, Inter Alia manages to deliver an exciting concept (and it deserves praise for being such a divisive play!), but it does very little in the way of taking a stance on its own themes, and doesn’t necessarily do what it says on the tin. With better pacing and a commitment to genre and a clear message, Inter Alia could be an outstanding piece of theatre.