Peter Viney's Blog

By Suzie Miller
Directed by Justin Martin
Set & costume by Miriam Buether
Lighting design by Natasha Chivers
Composers Erin leCount / James Jacob PKA Jakwob

National Theatre Live streaming
(Lyttelton Theatre 10 July- 13 September 2025)

Poole Lighthouse
Saturday 27th September 19.45

CAST
Rosamund Pike – Jessica Parks, a judge
Jasper Talbot- Harry, her son
Jamie Glover- Michael, her husband, a barrister

ensemble
Louisa Clein
Luke Garner-Greene
Thomas Michelson
+
young company

Well, not actually ‘live’ in that Poole had three streamings this month. They had to keep adding more. This is the same writer, Suzie Miller, and director, Justin Martin, as Prima Facie which we haven’t seen yet. Tickets for both were near impossible to get and even the first two local streamings sold out right away. Tonight was full. Next year’s Prima Facie tour was totally sold out weeks ago. We started with Bath, then Cardiff, then Canterbury, then Birmingham for tickets. No joy. On these two playa, Suzie Miller is a phenomenon. She is a lawyer turned playwright. Prima Facie was a one hander. Inter Alia is more complex while still revolving around one central actor, Rosamund Pike, who never leaves the stage, and everything is channeled through her.

My repeat comment on NT Live in cinemas. It is different. The video director chooses your gaze. Compared to live theatre, you will then miss peripheral action, but you will benefit from close ups. Seeing it in a cinema in the dark with a large screen is way better than TV at home, however good your system is.

Rosamund Pike plays Jessica Parks, a judge married to a barrister. They have an 18 year old son. How do you describe this play? The set changes are seamless and unnoticeable with no breaks or jumps. They just happen. Court room, living room, forest.

Rosamund Pike never pauses. She is full on for 105 minutes. The many costume changes are all on stage while speaking. She moves props around continually. She is so fast, she leaps on and off tables too.

She had fifteen years away from live theatre. How did she adjust to this amount of non-stop energy? Film is about four minutes shot in a day. For actors so much is waiting to perform. Not here. Pike does nearly all the speaking. She holds conversations with fellow judges and lawyers, Grace and Danielle, and with Marshall, a KC (Kings Counsel = Barrister). She does both her voice and the response from the person she is talking too. She does mild Irish for Grace, mild Northern for Danielle, RP for Marshall. Marshall is represented by a jacket on a chair. I was in awe of her technique. We used to do this in ELT Teacher training, how to present a dialogue in class when you have no recorded material on audio. You try to represent two speakers with voice and movement. The way she did a conversation shifting the phone from one ear (her) to the other ear (Grace) was brilliant. We tried to teach that, but she could have taught it much better.

There are also music bits where she sings, or mimes singing, incongrously as a judge. We see a drummer and thrash guitarist in the shadows. No musicians are credited. Is this Jasper Talbot and Jamie Glover? Jamie Glover plays a little guitar later. Is it the “ensemble” who appear only as shadows? Is it live or recorded? I don’t know. The NT Live programme doesn’t help, but I would say it was live. The still phopto below suggests strongly it’s Talbot on drums, Glover on guitar.

Jessica is a judge, a female judge, who handles many rape and child abuse and abuse of women cases. She explains that she is a martinet to the posh pompous and arrogant male counsels. She protects the traumatised female victims from their attacks in court. We open with a rape case. Notably the accused and accuser are early twenties, but it happened when they were eighteen. Such are the wheels of justice grinding slowly on. The case rests on consent, and the defence argue she consented, regretted and changed her mind. She says she had passed out drunk and came round to find him on top of her. The man is sentenced to seven years.

The theme is that she is a judge, sitting in judgement of others, but throughout she is being judged. The main one is as a mother.

The mother theme starts strongly in a wooded area with swings. The 4 year old Harry goes missing. Jessica knows about child abductions and is frantic – he is found unharmed, represented by a yellow anorak. As a judge in child cases she is concerned that a stranger has tried to touch his willie.

Then as a domestic goddess – she prepares a dinner party for sixteen, while her husband’s only contribution is the cheese board, and he has that delivered pre-packed. Then laundering and ironing clothes for her son (including best steam iron acting you’ll see). There is much fuss about her ironing the Hawaiian shirt (which will later be a plot hinge). Then she is judged as a sex bomb in a post-party scene with her husband. The “sex” scene is brilliantly performed (and simulated fully dressed).

Then she is judged as a singer, a dancer, a karaoke queen. She is judged as a female best friend. She is judged as a judge by Michael, her KC husband, who admits he sees the fact of her being called to the bench instead of him as positive discrimination in favour of women. When she explodes, he compounds the sin by saying patronisingly ‘and so they should.’

Harry is eighteen, played by Jasper Talbot, who just a year ago played a convincing young Mick Jagger in Redlands at Chichester. Harry is bullied at school, tries unsuccessfully to fit in. There is an older scene when she thinks he’s watching porn at age twelve and she tries to explain fears about penis size, hilariously with a huge pepper pot. After their dinner party, Harry returns at midnight (just after their sex scene) completely drunk after the teenage party. There is much discussion of maternal and paternal roles in parenting. Michael (great performance from Jamie Glover) is found lacking. Harry is a sixth former, about to take his A levels.

We had sort of guessed where it was going. Harry is asked to see the police. Michael immediately goes in full force getting a top solicitor friend to accompany him. It grows and grows and transpires that Harry is accused of rape by a girl, Amy, he has been friends with since childhood. Michael gets a top KC, much to Jessica’s dismay. She thinks it tactically bad. The jury will see it as a transparent use of money and power. She also says she knows what happens to eighteen year olds in adult prisons (yet she sentences them).

I won’t ruin the plot. It’s complex. It explores evidence and memory. It explores what ‘consent’ is and isn’t. ‘Inter alia’ (among other things) is what lawyers use to cover material they would rather not expose in court. Jessica is in a dilemma. There is the truth, and it need not be revealed in court. The law can fudge over the events. Scenes are played where she has a young Harry played by a child actor crayoning on one side of her, eighteen year old Harry on the other. At the end we return to the scene in the woods with six children, including Amy.

It’s a rich script, full of allusions and forewarnings . I noticed subtleties. Jessica shops at Tesco, not at the ‘posh shop’ (which would be Waitrose or Marks & Spencer). That’s a tip at the inverted snobbery of left wing lawyers, perhaps?

The script covers areas – abducted children, abused children where the offence is crystal clear, then there is the muddy waters of consent when drunk at a teenage party. We discussed it afterwards. We remember being in Exeter and Norwich after plays at night walking back to hotels, and seeing late teenage / early twenties pissing in public – both sexes, girls were squatting to pee, girls were puking in the gutter, thonged bums in the air. Boys were pissing wherever. In Norwich a paramedic bus was parked waiting. A late night Tesco Express had two security guards outside. We’re told Bournemouth when the clubs close is worse. What brave new world we created with long licensing hours, cheap alcohol. I say this as someone who drinks wine with dinner most days. I’m not a teetotaller. What brave new world have the internet kings created with access to online porn from an early age. How do kids cope? That is the theme. What does ‘consent’ mean where the parties are totally addled with alcohol? The word ‘frontloading’ had to be explained to us. It’s putting down a bottle of supermarket spirits before you go clubbing so as to avoid the high prices in the clubs. Our day really was different. Pubs closed early. Spirits were too expensive for us. Supermarkets had Sanatogen tonic wine and green stamps rather than aisles of spirits, wine and beer. You had to go to an off licence or the off sales hatch at a pub. Yes, sometimes we drank far too much. I’ve never touched rum after puking rum and black on my own 18th birthday. However alcohol just it wasn’t that available nor affordable. It was hard to get that drunk on Watneys Party Sevens beer as so much liquid had to be ingested. For 1970 prices in 2025, you need to multiply by nineteen. A bottle of whisky in 1970 was £2.69. That’s £51 now. So a supermarket own brand bottle of spirits on offer at £14 now is effectively about a quarter of the price then. The cheapest wine was about ten shillings (50p). That was Carafino, which we called Parafino. That would be £9.50 now – and that is double the price of the bottom shelf Tesco really cheap stuff. Mateus Rose was about £1. So £19 now.

“Porn” in my teenage was a copy of Health & Efficiency with nudists doing athletic exercises in a field in blurry black and white. Top shelf magazines came later. Yes, we’d see Playboy (not only because they had great short story writers and cartoonists.) As Jessica makes clear in the play, porn intimidates boys, and makes girls feel they are expected to do things they are not comfortable with. Then it all gets shared on Instagram.

We came out feeling sorry for a whole generation. The play is complex, and thought provoking. ‘Harrowing’ was the first word that came to mind. We felt too old for it. It should be compulsory viewing in sixth forms.

*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

five star
Joanna Magill, Radio Times *****
Mail on Sunday *****
Broadway World *****
four star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
Emma John, Guardian ****
Alice Saville, Independent ****
Financial Times ****
Evening Standard ****
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ****
The i ****
What’s On Stage ****
Arts Desk ****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

JUSTIN MARTIN (DIRECTOR)
Kyoto, RSC 2024

ROSAMUND PIKE
Hostiles (film)
Made in Dagenham (film)

JAMIE GLOVER
The Rehearsal, by Jean Anouilh, Chichester 2015
An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde, Chichester 2014
Miss Julie /. Black Comedy, Chichester 2014 (DIRECTOR)

JASPER TALBOT
Redlands, by Charlotte Jones, Chichester 2014 (Mick Jagger)