Suzie Miller's Prima Facie is one of the more genuinely effective pieces of activist theatre in recent memory — a one-woman show that changed jury directions in rape trials in multiple jurisdictions. That's not critical inflation; that's an empirical outcome. So the question worth asking about Inter Alia, her 2025 National Theatre follow-up starring Rosamund Pike, is not whether Miller has important things to say about rape culture and the legal system. She clearly does. The question is whether the novelisation of that play delivers those things — and the answer, per this review, is a fairly damning no. The theatrical premise is structurally rich: Jessica Parks, a feminist judge who has spent her career watching defence lawyers exploit procedural loopholes in rape cases, discovers that her own 18-year-old son has been accused of sexual assault. The moral trap is obvious but that's not a flaw — it's the mechanism. The trap only works if Jessica is credibly competent and credibly blind at the same time. On stage, Rosamund Pike apparently carried that contradiction. On the page, Miller can't sustain it. The problem is a craft problem, not a theme problem. Jessica as written in the novel poses questions she should know the answers to, delivers speeches to herself that no person with her intelligence and self-awareness would deliver, and observes her own reflection with lines like 'I want to be a judge who is also a woman, who is also herself completely. And this is me. Jessica.' That sentence is doing the work that an actor's body language, hesitation, and breath would do in the theatre — and it fails, because prose cannot outsource its emotional freight to a performer. The vehicle has to be built for the road. The structural consequence is significant. When Jessica's interiority is this thin, the novel's systemic critique — Miller's real subject, which is how privileged boys raised by progressive parents still feel entitled to female bodies — gets swallowed by one woman's bewilderment. The teenage victim, already a secondary figure, becomes a prop. The social argument becomes a personal growth arc. This is the opposite of what Prima Facie achieved, which was to centre the survivor and make the system's cruelty felt from the inside. There's an honest question embedded in this review that Miller's track record makes harder to dismiss: why, having already received a lukewarm reception for her Prima Facie novelisation, has she done this again? The reviewer's read — indifference to the specific demands of narrative prose — seems right. Forty-plus plays is an extraordinary body of work. But theatre and the novel are not adjacent crafts that share technique; they are genuinely different forms with different load-bearing structures. What a director and actor can recover in performance, the novelist has to build on the page. Miller, at least in these novelisations, hasn't built it. The result is a novel that will likely find readers because of the play's reputation and Pike's performance, and that will frustrate most of them. The political urgency is real — the reviewer notes reading the book while the Cornell University sexual assault case made headlines, a reminder that the subject matter regenerates faster than any single work can address it. That urgency deserves a sharper instrument.
