Suzie Miller’s acclaimed 2019 play, Prima Facie, was a visceral exposé of the cruelty of due process in rape trials that has, on any analysis, been tremendously successful. It has been staged in more than 50 countries, won countless awards and been adapted into a film starring Cynthia Erivo; it has been used to educate judges and even resulted in changes to jury directions in rape trials, energising debate about better outcomes for survivors.
Miller is a prolific playwright (her latest of more than 40 plays, Strong is the New Pretty, is currently touring Australia), and Inter Alia, which premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2025, picks up themes that animated Prima Facie. The 2025 production starred Rosamund Pike as Jessica Parks: a feminist judge whose ethics are shaken when her 18-year-old son is accused of sexual assault. Pike gives a captivating performance of a desperate and disoriented woman working within a broken justice system. From the bench, Jessica has watched in dismay as defence lawyers exploit loopholes to keep their clients out of jail in rape trials. But when her son is accused, inconsistencies in the testimony of a traumatised victim give Jessica reason to hope he will be let off.
Inter Alia was an effective piece of theatre – but Miller has transformed it into a novel and the results are infuriating. The book is presented as a legal drama about the collision of the ethical and the emotional but, unlike the play, it’s a story about a privileged woman coming to a belated understanding of her life and circumstances. If Prima Facie gained moral momentum by centring the experience of a survivor, the teenage rape victim in the novelisation is a prop in a personal growth narrative. And without the nuances and vulnerabilities conveyed by Pike, Jessica is a much-reduced character.
We learn a lot more about Jessica in the novel but she always seems surprised by the moment, as if her backstory crept up on her out of nowhere. Her marriage to the smug KC Michael is expanded too but, despite all the padding, the reader is given no grounds for the longevity of this relationship. Jessica tells us that Michael resents her for being named a judge before him; that he insinuated she only got the call because she was a woman. Michael is a sexist git but you wonder whether he might be on to something: in the play, Jessica exudes a competence carried by brazen confidence; but, in the novel, thanks to clunky writing, Jessica strikes the reader as imperceptive and foolish.
Often she’s making brisk, empty statements about how things work: “I can read my courtroom. I can read the barristers, the court staff, the public, the defendants. And I can read the witnesses, the complainants. It’s here that I can effect real change.” We know she’s kidding herself about her ability to effect change; the plot is so heavily signposted that the novel’s laboured ironies work to diminish the narrator without inspiring much sympathy for her.
And while on stage we’re with Jessica as she tries to make sense of it all, leaping from past to present at a dizzy pace, that’s not the case in the novel, where urgency is deflated by asides and cliches. Jessica looks in the mirror in her chambers after putting on red lipstick and observes her reflection: “I want to be a judge who is also a woman, who is also herself completely. And this is me. Jessica.” Inane bromides like these add up to a caricature of an ambitious but insecure woman. She may be a complex character onstage but she’s one-dimensional and unconvincing on the page, unable to communicate the moral tangle of her circumstances.
In an early scene, she contemplates reprimanding a barrister from the bench: “The power I have is exciting. If I was telling it as a story in chambers, I would laugh with the delight of it. But only to those other judges who understand the dynamic.” So much of the writing is of this order: lifeless and dull. This is less a matter of Jessica being an ironically unreliable narrator, tragically unable to see what is in front of her until it is too late, I think, than the novelist’s poor command of her craft.
The novel also drags thanks to Jessica’s habit of posing strings of questions that she should be able to answer. For instance: “Somehow since I’ve become a judge, I seem to be pushing myself to be something of a domestic goddess … Why do I need to prove myself at home? Am I catering to Michael’s insecurities around me being more successful in the law?”
These are small questions compared with the moral compromise Jessica must wrestle with later. Harry is the son of two legal professionals, who has been educated about consent – and who is now accused of raping a teenage girl at a party. Jessica cannot believe it. Where the play rushes on, as if to demonstrate Jessica’s powerlessness, the novel plods, as if to emphasise her foolishness. Jessica cannot believe it – until she must. She talks the reader through every doubt, every I couldn’t believe it moment. And, in doing so, Miller’s systemic critique of a culture in which privileged boys raised by progressive parents still feel entitled to the bodies of girls is lost, sucked into the vortex of Jessica’s bewilderment.
Certainly Inter Alia shows how difficult it is for women to parent and to work, and the different standards mothers must meet in the legal profession. But for all that, when it comes to understanding who’s to blame for rape culture, this novel still lays a heavy burden of responsibility on mothers for being – as Jessica sees herself – both overprotective and neglectful. Jessica comes to a limp realisation late in the piece: “In my failing Harry, in our failing a generation of boys by neglecting to mentor them, guide them or show them the way, we are failing a whole generation of girls.” There’s a nod to collective failures – but the novel’s scope is constrained by the lack of complexity and limited perspective of its narrator; and by Miller’s limitations as a novelist too.
I read Inter Alia as the shocking alleged sexual assault at Cornell University made headlines; if I’d read it a month earlier or later, there would have been another assault in the news. We need feminist artists to keep holding rape culture to account, to keep asking why perpetrators are treated with impunity. But in turning Jessica into such a weak character, Inter Alia’s powerful rebuke to a patriarchal legal system that benefits rapists is diluted. It’s not that the problems with the novel are entirely absent from the play – but an actor can convey the pathos of Jessica’s desperate efforts to fix everything in a way that Miller’s narrator simply cannot.
When Miller novelised Prima Facie, the book received a lukewarm reception. Why has this accomplished theatre-maker delivered another underwhelming version of another celebrated play? Moving from the stage to the page is less common as adaptations go, but this one seems to show an indifference to the narrative craft of the novel – and undercuts the original as a result.
