The playwright’s new drama ‘Inter Alia’ asks how we should bring up boys in an age of extreme pornography
“I think we’re all not very brave at having the conversations that are uncomfortable,” says Suzie Miller as we settle into a broodingly hot meeting room, mid London heatwave, in the National Theatre Studio. You could say the Australian lawyer-turned-playwright is on a mission to change that.
Her play Prima Facie blazed on to the West End stage in 2022: a scorching monologue from rising young defence lawyer Tessa (brilliantly played by Jodie Comer), whose faith in the legal system is shaken to the roots when she appears in court as the victim of date rape. Suddenly Tessa sees the process from the other side: her body, clothes, intimate past and personal behaviour are scrutinised and tiny inconsistencies in her recollections seized on….
But it was the response of a group of 14-year-old boys to Prima Facie that prompted Miller to write her new play, Inter Alia. “Afterwards one of them was leaping up and down saying, ‘That was the best theatre I’ve ever seen!’ But then he said, ‘We didn’t even know that was rape.’” (In the play, Tessa has already had consensual sex with her attacker before he later forces himself on her.) “And I thought, ‘Therein lies the problem.’ If they don’t even realise that it’s rape, the culture we’ve set up to teach them and raise them is letting them down, as well as the girls.”
Miller, a sparky, witty woman in her early sixties, realised that what was needed was a much broader conversation: “It’s much bigger than a legal problem, it’s actually a community problem.” And it’s into that maelstrom that Inter Alia plunges. The new play — now in previews at London’s National Theatre — focuses on Jessica (Rosamund Pike), a Crown Court judge, who, like Tessa, rapidly finds herself on the other side of the system when a crisis hits her family….