This legal drama centers on Jessica, a respected London judge and proud feminist, whose professional and personal worlds collide when her own son is accused of rape.

It’s hard to talk about this without contextualizing it as a spiritual sequel to Prima Facie. Like the earlier play, Inter Alia is a monologue-heavy character study—Jessica, the narrator-lead, delivers about 80% of the lines—about a barrister with deep expertise in sexual assault cases whose worldview is shaken when she’s personally affected by one. This is a wheelhouse piece for playwright Suzie Miller in both form and content, to the disadvantage of the latter show: Miller risks “retread” allegations by the fussier members of the audience. Is she developing a thesis or diluting one?

Jessica’s known for her empathy from the bench; a female judge just makes women feel more comfortable speaking to their experiences, she says. Work served with a side of emotional labor classically falls to women, and precocious Jessica—youthful for a judge, in her mid-40s—takes on a docket full of rape cases with aplomb, claiming a mantle of feminist crusader. Director Justin Martin adds interstitial court-is-now-in-session id-sequences in which Rosamund Pike’s Jessica envisions herself as a literal rock star, her internal voice decrying “the fucking patriarchy” from the first line of the play as she “reins [in the] testosterone” of the defence counsel.

Rock-‘n’-roller is just one identity that a virtuosic Pike steps into over the course of the show, tirelessly code-switching throughout, and, golly, is this ever a great opportunity to flex her talents. In a preface, Miller notes that in Latin, inter alia means “among other things,” referring to the fundamental character tension for Jessica: her neatly-arranged mother, woman, judge, and individual selves colliding. In a quiet moment, she reflects on her apparent disappearance under the ceremonial wig, attempting to alleviate it with a pop of red lipstick. Meanwhile, she’s managing the fragile ego of her less-successful husband, Michael, trying to make time with friends, and, in her estimation, raising her son, Harry, by herself.

“When did I end up being the primary carer?” Jessica muses, torn between resentment for Michael and pride for the young man she’s raised. And then, all of a sudden, her world falls apart: Harry is credibly accused of rape. Harry? The sweet little boy I adored? Reeling, Jessica takes stock of when things might have gone wrong. Was she too pushy, or not enough? Is the culture rotten? Was it “men’s business”—what did Michael teach him about how to be a good man?

“I tried to raise a feminist son.” “So did I, Jess.” It’s in these moments of casting about for answers that the play feels most visceral. Pike’s voice trailing off as she reads a lawyer’s detached brief. Her cold recoil from Harry’s touch. Her unbridled anger as she shouts across the table at her husband. It’s Pike’s show, for sure, but some of the heaviest moments really belong to Jamie Glover’s emotionally repressed portrayal of Michael, judiciously allotted for maximum effect.

Stepping back, you can see the outline of a big-tent feminist critique of the legal system: that it is fundamentally ill-designed to deal with sexual violence, turning the courtroom into a zero-sum proxy battleground of the sexes—the victim disadvantaged by an all-but-impossible burden of proof. Did the plaintiff consent? Did the defendant reasonably think that she did? When the definition of a crime depends on the unknowable contents of its parties’ hearts, the deck is stacked. Under duress, even the activist judge Jessica begins to entertain the thought—and the ramifications—of shooting for the legal victory over a moral one. The system demands that everyone gets an opportunity to test the evidence—“not guilty” is not the same as “innocent,” and the exact distance between the two is obscured by a fog of gamesmanship.

Critically, the protagonists of Prima Facie and Inter Alia are both successful women working within this system. Of everyone on the planet who hasn’t been directly affected by sexual assault, they ought to have just about the most robust understanding of it—but, nevertheless, their perspectives change when it turns personal. The uneasy reality is that an us-versus-them binary is an oversimplification; the blind spot isn’t as cut and dry as “men aren’t being empathetic enough, and shame on them.” Not that men are off the hook, exactly—no bad deed should go unpunished—but the point is that the blind spot is human. Women can miss this or perpetuate it, too, and using sexual assault cases as raw ammunition for a larger gender war is, in its own way, more interested in using the victims than helping them. The system is an insufficient construction by people who lack the necessary perspective. And, ultimately, nobody is especially well-served by the current status quo—people get hurt, victims have a hard time getting justice, perpetrators have to dig in even in the case of a well-intentioned mistake, nobody has any incentive to talk it out or apologize, families get fucked up, and even an empathetic arbiter like Jessica can’t fix all this. A systemic failure is a collective one, and we all poison our young men, and we all wound our young women.

While it is true that many of these themes and much of the structure were introduced in Prima Facie first, I think it would be a mistake to discount Inter Alia as its own impressive work on that basis. It is, perhaps, a good opportunity to cross-examine your own critical values. How much does it matter if a play has something novel to say? What if it’s an important thing to say? What if it’s effectively said? But I think flat answers to these questions would still miss the joint thesis yielded by the addition of another perspective, and they’d be too in-the-weeds to appreciate the confluence of writing, acting, and direction on display here. It’ll be so interesting to see how Suzie Miller continues to develop her ideas with the third installment. What a terrific piece of theater.