Inter Alia - Review

National Theatre, London

****

Written by Suzie Miller

Directed by Justin Martin

Rosamund Pike

Inter Alia is another theatrical gem from Suzie Miller, who in 2019 premiered Prima Facie. Staying within the jurisprudent ambit of the English legal system, Inter Alia sees Miller focus on Crown Court judge Jessica Parks and the challenges she faces in her domestic life when teenage son Harry is accused of a sex crime. 

Miller offers a meticulously detailed analysis of Park’s privileged life on and off the bench, where with her KC husband Michael, middle-class luxuries are plentiful until the idyll is painfully pierced. The script offers up a troubling glimpse of the manosphere, alongside Parks’s descent into her own personal hell as she finds herself facing profoundly personal conflicts. 

Coincidentally (one imagines), there are hints of the recent TV drama Adolescence in Miller’s narrative and if there is a flaw in the play that otherwise offers up a powerfully sympathetic critique of 21st century feminism, it is that much like Adolescence, the completely white casting of these stories’ lead families fails to reflect some of the more complex diversities of today’s world. And the end of Miller’s story, while being acutely painful, lacks a credibility.

The evening’s stagecraft however is world class. Rosamund Pike is Parks, onstage throughout the play’s 1 hr 40min one-act entirety, in a performance that is a breathtaking tour de force. As her character faces agonising realisations, Pike’s mastery of the dialogue is sensational, picking up the slightest nuances and inflections in Miller’s acutely perceptive script.

Jamie Glover steps up as her husband, also delivering a stunning take on middle-aged husbandry and fatherhood, with Jasper Talbot completing the play’s adult trio as the hapless Harry, again with an assured turn.

The production also showcases the flawless technical competencies of the National Theatre. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design is exquisite, equally Natasha Chivers’s lighting work. Miriam Buether’s set is a wonder. In essence a staging of simple domesticity that momentarily can transform into a courtroom - however the brilliance of Buether’s achievement in the play’s final act has to be seen to be believed.

Runs until 13th September

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

The Father - Review

Duke of York's Theatre, London


*****


Written by Florian Zeller
Translated by Christopher Hampton
Directed by James Macdonald

Kenneth Cranham

With three Olivier Nominations just announced, Florian Zeller's modern French masterpiece The Father and its remarkable insight into the effects of Alzheimer's Disease makes a four-week return to the West End. Translated by Christopher Hampton, himself unrivalled in capturing the nuances of French prose for an English audience, this one act journey, thrusts us into the world of the ageing André, whose mind has succumbed to the ravages of the disease.

Zeller's genius is not only pitching us into André's world, but rather making us both spectator of and, remarkably, a participator in that crumbling world too. To a typically intelligent theatre audience, possessed of decent mental faculties, Alzheimer's Disease and its gradual erosion of memory and reason is a nightmare that we may have observed in people close to us, but may not have considered from the perspective of the sufferer. Zeller makes that perspective happen - and as his narrative unfolds, so do we find ourselves drawn into André's whirlpool of confusion. To reveal more would be to spoil, suffice to say that with the final scene and André's lonely frightened eyes, staring at us as he clings to his carer, we are left with having shared the tiniest glimpse of the desperate fear and uncertainty that Alzheimer’s wreaks upon its victims.

Kenneth Cranham as André is up for one of those Oliviers and his is a tough act to beat. As we witness the confusion he displays to those who care for him and love him, what is at first disquietingly comic, becomes increasingly desperate and tragic. Cranham masters André's early indignant irascibility and there are snatches both of Shakespeare's Lear and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman as he slowly descends into uncomprehending terror.

Opposite Cranham, Amanda Drew steps in to the Duke of York's production to play his daughter Anne. We witness Drew offering a sensitive performance, struggling with her father's mental decay and its impact upon her own life. Or do we? And just beneath the surface there's a hint of a historic family tragedy, underlining the memories that André struggles to retain.

It's not just Zeller's words that mark The Father out as an Olivier nominated piece of new writing, it is his understanding of stagecraft too. The play marks an inspirational deployment of technical skill as sound, light and scenery subtly combine to create a world in which nothing is what it seems. Credit to Miriam Buether's design, Guy Hoare's lighting and Christopher Shutt's Olivier nominated sound design

Profoundly disorienting and disturbing, if you can bear it The Father makes for essential, unmissable theatre. Sure, it messes with our minds, but only for 90 minutes. Alzheimer's lasts forever.

Runs until 26th March, then tours to Richmond and Brighton.