Mere seconds into this 2025 National Theatre production of Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, it becomes evident that, as the kids say nowadays, Rosamund Pike’s back will hurt from carrying it. It’s not long before the audience realises that the storytelling rests on a lead performance requiring an inexpressible amount of energy, pathos, determination, and fire. For a perspiration-inducing amount of time, Pike rushes back and forth, brings inanimate props into sentience, sings, shouts, simulates sex, alternates between the roles of judge, mother, wife and friend, and enacts with vivid verisimilitude the full gamut of human emotion. Love, fear, and joy are as present as denial, hope, and disillusionment. You come away from it reeling, floored by the skill with which Pike shows us Jessica, a legal practitioner confronted with the possibility of her only child having committed rape. But I had an extra thought: Why does this feel like a one-woman show?

Works of theatre dominated by the tormented female protagonist and her monologues are not new. They have existed since Medea first declared that she would rather slaughter her offspring than see them humiliated, and continued with Tennessee Williams’ array of disillusioned Southern belles. But what makes this incarnation of Suzie Miller’s follow-up to Prima Facie unique is how the stage itself depends on Pike for its animation. There’s barely a moment in which an object – a dress, a drawer, a computer, a wig, or a yellow raincoat representing her son’s childhood self – is not in the process of being manipulated, carried, flung, or twisted. These movements inflame the dialogue, acting as a sort of visual correlative. Pike doesn’t just use the space – she is the space. It becomes a part of her, and this is why, despite excellent performances from the supporting cast, so much of our attention is focused on the lead. We leave the auditorium replaying those quick changes in our minds.

“Works of theatre dominated by the tormented female protagonist and her monologues are not new”

It’s arguable that this kind of intensive choreography, which is so laser-focused on one individual, has its downsides. The other characters, despite not having as much to do or say, are still integral puzzle pieces for the overall narrative. The paternal incompetence of the protagonist’s husband Michael, and the alarming speed with which he starts formulating ways in which to legally cover up his son’s wrongdoing (regardless of whether or not he is actually guilty), are vital characteristics contributing to the play’s commentary on casual rape culture. Furthermore, while the boy, Harry, is in many ways a product of his mother and her well-meaning, occasionally clumsy devotion, it is his conscious decision to commit a horrific act that provides the principal conflict in Jessica’s storyline. Pike steals the show with her unerring energy, vivacity, and emotional realism, but I can’t help wondering what sort of production it would have been had the male leads had their arcs physically incorporated to the same degree.

“It’s arguable that this kind of intensive choreography, which is so laser-focused on one individual, has its downsides”

Then again, such a production would not necessarily be improved. Perhaps such a directorial choice would have affected the impeccable undercurrents of unease underlying the dramatic action and eventually build to an apotheosis. Show the audience the thought process governing Harry’s devastating decision, remove the suspense, and the gut punch of his mother’s realisation is somewhat blunted. Once again Tennessee Williams provides an example of a playwright who gives his female leads the space to dominate, both dialogically and emotionally. The key difference between his writing and Miller’s is that his male characters fill the stage just as completely with their visceral energy. Who can forget that moment in A Streetcar Named Desire in which Stanley Kowalski smashes a plate at dinner and confronts his cowering wife and sister-in-law? In essence, Williams’ plays contain women who predominate in a declamatory sense, and men who ground that self-expression in a dangerous physical reality with their brutishness. Suzie Miller makes a bold decision in the opposite direction, which is to deprive Michael and Harry of any kind of significant physicality, despite them being the story’s literal and psychological aggressors. The rape itself takes place offstage, and Jessica is the one inflamed with rage or another form of tension throughout the play, while her male companions prefer, for the most part, to obfuscate and cower. The genius of this choice, then, is to underscore their spinelessness – they lack Jessica’s vitality, both literally and abstractly.

Perhaps we should coin a new name for Miller’s (unintentional?) phenomenon: ‘the one woman show featuring more than one woman’. This formula trains the audience’s eye so intensely on a singular figure that it almost feels exclusionary of others; but gradually, you’ll begin to understand that rather than downplaying certain players and their contributions, it makes their flaws and neuroses come alive.