Suzie Miller on her Prima Facie follow-up Inter Alia: ‘Boys are looking for male mentors. Instead they get the internet and porn’ | Theatre

When Prima Facie premiered on the Stables Theatre in Sydney in 2019, it sliced via the theatre panorama. Suzie Miller’s one-woman drama a couple of legal barrister confronting the brutal inadequacies of sexual-assault prosecutions has since turn into a worldwide phenomenon.Starring Jodie Comer in London and on Broadway, it received an Olivier award in 2024, broke box-office information, has been staged in practically 50 international locations in lots of languages and resulted in actual modifications to how the legislation works. For Miller, who got here late to theatre after working as a human rights lawyer, the play’s success was each a vindication and a provocation.This 12 months she mixed courtroom, theatre and her home sphere in a extra formidable work, Inter Alia, commissioned by London’s Nationwide Theatre and starring Saltburn’s Rosamund Pike, who performs a crown court docket choose whose teenage son is accused of sexual assault by a woman he has grown up with. Whereas Prima Facie places the complainant’s expertise beneath the microscope, Inter Alia pivots the lens to ask: what occurs when the wrongdoer is considered one of your personal? What occurs when the values of feminism and legislation collide with the instincts of motherhood?“I’m making an attempt to refocus on how sexual assault doesn’t match neatly into the judicial system because it stands,” Miller says. “It’s not nearly legislation. It’s about group values.”Inter Alia bought out earlier than Pike began rehearsals, and acquired glowing evaluations, with the Guardian calling it “a searing commentary on the justice system and a purposefully uncomfortable perception into up to date parenting”. There was hypothesis a couple of West Finish remount however, within the meantime, a filmed model is on screens within the UK and can land in Australian cinemas this month. A novelisation shall be revealed in 2026.Suzie Miller: ‘Each girl I do know says they stay in worry of their son being accused of one thing.’ {Photograph}: Sarah HadleyPrima Facie and Inter Alia discover a system Miller is aware of intimately: its procedures, its blind spots and its language. “If you’ve stood beside somebody in court docket, you perceive the theatre of it,” Miller says. “However you additionally see the place justice fractures. Theatre lets me interrogate these fractures in methods the legislation by no means can.”As a part of her writing course of Miller interviewed feminine judges and attorneys – many, like Miller, moms of sons – a couple of probably ruinous conundrum: what if the system I uphold in the future ensnares my youngster?“Each girl I do know says they stay in worry of their son being accused of one thing and ending up in jail,” Miller explains. “Not as a result of they need to excuse dangerous behaviour, however as a result of they know the system is brutal and binary. Some girls need perpetrators jailed. Others need acknowledgment, apology, restore. However the legislation hardly ever permits for something between acquittal and a custodial sentence.”Jasper Talbot as Harry and Rosamund Pike as Jessica in Inter Alia. {Photograph}: Manuel HarlanInter Alia has been in comparison with the Netflix hit Adolescence: each ask audiences to contemplate how boys are inducted into masculinity and what occurs when dad and mom, notably moms, are shut out of that dialog.“You increase these attractive, rambunctious boys,” Miller says, “after which as youngsters, moms turn into much less related. They’re in search of male mentors, and I don’t suppose they’re discovering them. As a substitute they get the web, porn, locker-room banter. We don’t equip them with instruments to navigate that area. And we hand over their schooling in intercourse and relationships to the web.”Miller additionally interviewed males over 40 to glean insights for the daddy character within the play. Many confessed to uncomfortable recollections of youthful encounters at drunken events, and described a tradition at the moment the place “enjoying exhausting to get” was a part of the script and notions of consent had been hazy. “Numerous males mentioned they had been scared to look again too intently,” Miller says. “It’s not that they suppose they raped anybody however they will’t be completely certain that the opposite particular person’s expertise won’t have been very completely different.”In Inter Alia, Pike’s character is each choose and mom; the play shifts between the excessive rhetoric of the courtroom and the chaotic multitasking of household life. “When she’s in court docket she will be able to management the narrative,” Miller explains. “At house she will be able to’t. That’s what girls recognised within the play, the limitless invisible labour, the way in which crises all the time default to mum, the humour of juggling all of it. I’ve spoken to numerous girls who mentioned, ‘I didn’t realise I did this daily till I noticed it on stage.’”Pike’s riveting efficiency marked the actor’s return to stay theatre for the primary time in 14 years. Miller was impressed by her bravery. “This was a brand-new play, untested, bought out earlier than she arrived at rehearsal,” Miller says. “She knew there’d be fixed rewrites. That takes braveness. However she has such magnificence, such physicality. Working with an actor of that calibre lifts the writing enormously.”The Guardian mentioned Pike gave a ‘bodily, sometimes anarchic efficiency’ as Jessica, a choose, mom and spouse. {Photograph}: Manuel HarlanMiller hints that Inter Alia often is the second in a unfastened trilogy. “I’ve checked out it from the complainant’s facet, now from the household’s facet,” she says. “The subsequent one shall be one other portal once more.” She can also be growing new works for London, Sydney and Brisbane subsequent 12 months, together with a drama based mostly on the creation of the Australian girls’s soccer league titled Robust Is the New Fairly.Miller confesses to feeling cautious of being pigeonholed as a crusader-playwright bent on reforming the justice system. Her work, she insists, is much less about solutions than questions however the questions minimize deep.What if the blunt instrument of legal legislation is the improper software for the nuance of sexual consent? How will we increase sons who will be respectful in all of the worlds, actual and digital, that they inhabit? And what represents “justice” to feminine victims of sexual violence?“If the one punishment is jail, who will ever apologise? Who will ever admit they overstepped? We’d like different avenues. Intercourse lives are messy. Medicine, alcohol, youth … they complicate it. The legislation makes it binary, however lived expertise isn’t binary.”