by Three years ago, the playwright Suzie Miller Jodie Comer gave a career-friendly role in her western debut in Prima Facie. Rosamund Pikes stage resume already has a lot of heights, from Hitchcock Blonde to Hedda Gabler, but her performance in Millers Follow-up game was very expected because some of the teams that combine prima facie into a hit.
This is an almost conscious counterpoint to Prima facie, in which a defender, expert who plays the system to tear off rape costs against its customers is reversed through their own experiences with sexual assault. Miller wanted to emphasize how bad the law serves to the victims, and among other things, the same problem with a female judge presents the same problem that is determined to do the system, whose world occurred through an accusation near home near Home.
Jessica Parks (Pike) is the kind of much -qualified woman, from whom you only know that the legal system needs more. It brings humanity and compassion into her courtroom and uses her soft skills to protect witnesses in need of protection and at the same time to fell high -spirited male advice with a tone that can “cut tendons and bones”. But she is not only a judge of the Crown Court, she is also an expert juggler who is so often that high-ranking women have to be so often. Her career exists “among other things” – as Miller puts it, in the cracks of everyone else’s life.
All trademarks from Justin Martin’s pulsating direction are here, from the onstage guitar and drums, which increase the tension to pikes physical, occasionally anarchic performance. She is in constant movement and wears many different outfits karaoke queen, sexy woman, Marigold-Clean dishwasher and washwoman-and washing woman-and Miriam Buethers Set combines with Natasha Chivers’ lighting to capture the dissolution of the boundaries between the courtroom and at home.
“You live as you work, everything that is done at speed,” says a friend Jessica: It may sound like an honorary badge, but it is also an indictment against society that she demands from her. The term “emotional work” is never used, but is certainly available: While Jessica is preparing a dinner party for 16, the only responsibility of her husband Michael the cheese is. He delivered it.
This is not a solo show: Jamie Glover offers the marital tension as Michael, who was beaten by his wife both KC and on the bench. Harry, her 18-year-old son, mingles in Jasper Talbo’s representation between sensitive, grumpy and funny drunk, almost quietly and changing. But what begins as peripheral figures – organized, loved and maintained – are given important voices in the course of the narrative.
Jessica remains the moral and emotional center: her tragedy unfolds like that of an Ibsen protagonist who failed from her fellow human beings. As a mother, she did the best she can to protect her child from rackets and make it true to her feminist beliefs (there is a very funny scene in which you have the porn discussion). But she cannot protect him from social media or a group compulsion or in the end.
As a lawyer who became a playwright, Miller’s work has had a deeply rooted advocacy group for years – she used it to argue for social and legal justice. And one of the rare objections to the script from Prima Facie – the way the didactic dialogue affects the drama could be confirmed here. Determined to listen to every problem and a fair listening, throws, among other things, his maneuverability and wit when it deals with the serious things in the later stages, which means that the pace slows down, even if the confrontations become stronger.
When the set darkens and Jessica is literally lost in the forest, the feeling is that we all blindly shower towards an end, even a pike. However, production remains a setting comment on the judicial system and a deliberately unpleasant insight into contemporary parenthood. Prima facie remains just as relevant as three years ago – a British tour with a returning corner was announced for 2026 – and this is an ideal accompanying piece.
• Until September 13th in the Lyttelton Theater, National Theater, London. In cinemas from September 4.
