Portia demurs: rape, the manosphere and women lawyers in Suzie Miller's theatre
Review: Prima Facie (2022) and Inter Alia (2025)
Prima Facie, by Suzie Miller (National Theatre At Home)
Inter Alia, by Suzie Miller (National Theatre Live Encore, Ritzy Cinema, Brixton)
This review contains extensive spoilers for Prima Facie and Inter Alia.
Around the corner from Globe House, the international headquarters of British American Tobacco, past a wrought-iron, card-locked gate, sits a skew-whiff little building clad in a yellowish stone that never quite looks clean. This is Blackstone House, home to the eponymous Blackstone Chambers, undoubtedly one of the most renowned associations of lawyers anywhere in the English-speaking world. Until fairly recently, it was also the working home of Dinah Rose KC.
Rose is the kind of barrister to whom words like ‘distinguished’ seem to spring unbidden like shrapnel to an MRI machine. Her chambers page at Blackstone, where she is still a door tenant, repeats client feedback that describes her simply as ‘The most naturally gifted advocate one has ever seen.’ In December 2024, she was appointed to the panel of chairmen of the Competition Appeal Tribunal. This is a glittering career if ever that word were appropriate, and like many glittering careers in Britain, its latter years (as with its early days) feature a spell at Oxbridge: Dinah Rose is now President of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Yet nor was her career at the Bar ever the only string to her bow. Dinah Rose first came to public prominence overseeing an independent review of the BBC in response to the Savile scandal. That secondment produced a report called Respect at Work, whose remit rapidly broadened from responding to the systematic rape of children, enabled and covered up by the highest ranks of the British establishment, to more quotidian concerns (emphasis added):
In the wake of the Savile crisis - a period which shook the BBC to its core - many of our people asked the question “How could this have happened here?” This was swiftly followed by another question: “Could it happen at the BBC today?”. Whilst we believed, as a management team, that the BBC of today is not the same environment as that in which the sexual abuses of Savile went undetected, we did not wish to be complacent in making that assumption. Originally, therefore, this review was focused on the specific question of the extent to which sexual harassment is an issue in today’s BBC. We quickly expanded the focus, however, to include broader issues of behaviour in the BBC workplace. The reasons for this were, first, that Dinah Rose QC, who has overseen and provided independent challenge to the review, was of the view that any consideration of sexual harassment should also investigate the broader issues of bullying and the inappropriate use of power of which sexual harassment is only one manifestation. Secondly, the BBC is undergoing significant change both as a result of a need to save money and to keep pace with the ever increasing demands of being a multi-media organisation. Some managers, staff and the trade unions, have suggested that this is leading to increased stress and in some cases inappropriate behaviour as a result.
Stern stuff. Respect at Work concluded that the proper response to the crisis was (among other things) a refreshed Bullying and Harassment Policy and ‘further training in the circumstances in which suspension is or is not appropriate’ when a member of staff is accused of sexual harassment. BBC insiders are, of course, welcome to get in touch to tell us how that has turned out.
The 2010s saw Dinah Rose developing an active Twitter presence (which has since receded), but also saw her accept a brief she may well have come to regret. Two citizens of the Cayman Islands wished to enter a same-sex marriage and challenged the territory’s marriage law (which provided only for opposite-sex marriage) as being incompatible with its constitution. The Cayman Islands is a Commonwealth jurisdiction, and its law is mostly a close cousin of English law. As such, as an eminent silk, Dinah Rose was instructed to represent the government of the Cayman Islands before the Cayman Court of Appeals, securing a win for the government (and a loss for the disappointed Cayman homosexuals).
Following her election as Principal of Magdalen in 2020, Rose’s involvement in the Cayman case came to the attention of one Edwin Cameron, a gay rights and HIV/AIDS activist who also happened to be a retired justice of the South African Constitutional Court, a body established as part of the transition from apartheid. Mr Cameron is not a Magdalen man (he was, in fact, Chancellor of Stellenbosch University until last year), but that did not put him off issuing a ferocious broadside against Dinah Rose and her ‘homophobic case’ through the Oxford Human Rights Hub in January 2021.
Mr Cameron argued that under Magdalen’s equality policy, Rose had a duty to hand back her brief (i.e. resign from the case): to do otherwise would be to “actively reinforc[e] the continuum of violence against LGBTIQ people throughout the Caribbean”, and “sen[d] the same damaging, humiliating and stigmatizing message to the LGBTIQ community of Oxford and Magdalen: you are not equal, and I will not protect and defend your right to dignity.” If she would not do so, she should instead resign from Magdalen, and should do so “in the interests of Magdalen, in the interests of her own dignity and self-respect”.
Her response, published alongside Mr Cameron’s original statement in the South African lawyers’ magazine Advocate, was stiff-necked and entirely unrepentant. Not only would she not resign, she said, but the pressure being exerted upon her was actually illegitimate. Rose cited the “long-standing principle, essential to the maintenance of access to justice and the rule of law, that a lawyer is not to be subject to pressure to reject an unpopular brief.” It was this principle, she went on, that underlay the hot topic of the ‘cab rank rule’, which “prohibits barristers from refusing a brief which they are qualified and available to undertake on the ground that they or a section of the public disagree with or disapprove of the opinions or position of the client.” The rule applies to Privy Council work, and so she “was obliged to accept it”.
January 2021 was, if not Peak Woke, at least somewhere near the summit. It is perhaps surprising in that context that Rose survived: she refused to resign either from Magdalen or from the Cayman case, and indeed carried the latter right up to the Privy Council (where she won). In fact, to say she ‘survived’ would be rather to understate the position. To the extent that the Bar can be said to have wagons, they were decisively circled around her. Lord Hendy KC (now the rail minister under his fellow barrister, Sir Keir Starmer KC) supported her argument as to the cab rank rule, citing rather bathetically the fate of John Cooke, who was executed after the Restoration for accepting the brief to prosecute Charles I for treason. Joshua Rozenberg of the BBC wrote a fawning article for his Substack in which he said she “refused to be intimidated”, saying it was “extraordinary that Dinah Rose, of all people, should be accused of supporting homophobia” and reproducing her Advocate statement in full.
In perhaps the most remarkable coup, Rose sued the Times for defamation for, among other things, claiming that the Bar Standards Board (the Bar’s statutory regulator) had ruled against her. It had not. In fact, the BSB had sent a five-page decision document that Rose had not seen or had a chance to comment on to the Cayman campaigners, which she alleged had itself been defamatory—and for which the BSB later apologised, its statement ending with the now-familiar bromide about how it is “wholly unacceptable for barristers to be subject to abuse or harassment for carrying out their professional duty to act in unpopular cases”. The Bar Council (effectively the trade union for the profession) joined in the fun: the BSB’s actions were “unacceptable and inexcusable”, and it must review its processes —“root and branch”, of course.
The following year, Rose secured an apology in open court from the Times, along with agreed damages and costs: in other words, a total victory. Mollified, her reputation secure, Dinah Rose returned to Magdalen and occasional private practice. Nowadays, videos of her advocacy before the Privy Council in the Cayman case are used on training courses at some of the Inns of Court, teaching would-be barristers the finer points of the appellate jurisdiction. The present author is unaware of any controversy about this practice. The author is also unaware of whether the BSB did indeed dig up those roots and prune those branches.
The ‘Posh Turn’ of the 2010s (set out in three parts in J’Accuse) was not coincidentally a highly productive time for the public profile of women lawyers in Britain. Besides Dinah Rose, this was also the time of Charlotte Proudman appearing on podcasts about catfishing, Jessica Simor’s splenetic Twitter account, and above all, Lady Hale and her now infamous choice of jewellery. The spider brooch and the woman wearing it assume Acromantulan proportions in the memory of that fevered time. Her memoir, Spider Woman, is well known, but for younger readers we might recommend the hagiographical Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, by Afua Hirsch. Yours for £17.99 RRP, although the present author understands the Supreme Court’s gift shop sells it a little cheaper.
It was in that period that the playwright Suzie Miller hit the London stage. Miller — improbably, an Australian — is a lawyer by training but became a full-time playwright in 2009, when she was offered a year-long residency at the National Theatre. Her list of credits betrays a preoccupation with the Majesty of the Law: she has written plays about subjects as diverse as the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Indigenous Australian experience of prison, and a steamy affair between two jurors on a murder trial (called, thrillingly, Reasonable Doubt).
Her best-known play, Prima Facie, had an award-winning run at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022: it picked up Best New Play at the Olivier Awards, and its star Jodie Comer took home the Best Actress award as well. Veterans of London transport may remember it for its striking, if emo, poster that plastered Oxford Circus and Waterloo for months:
Prima Facie is about rape. Comer plays Tessa Ensler, a criminal defence barrister whose stock in trade is defending men accused of sexual assault. The play begins with Tessa poised in her room in chambers, lined with an impossible number of files and folders, reaching high into the ceiling of the theatre. The lights fade up, and Tessa is seen eating a Pot Noodle, looking around her as if she’s forgotten what she came in for, before pronouncing the single, baffling word, “Thoroughbreds!”
Our confusion is quickly cured, though, as Tessa launches into a stylised retelling of a criminal trial. Comer plays her laddishly, in her native Liverpudlian accent, yelling that the jury “love it!” and pantomiming out what she did in court to secure an acquittal for her client. After she says the words, “For me, the witness [i.e. the complainant] is just a witness”, attentive viewers will simply sit back, check their watch and wonder how long it will take before, with lumpen narrative inevitability, Tessa is herself raped, and finds herself on the sharp end of the system she loves.
Of course, it happens at the end of Act 1, but not before the audience is treated to all the hits of lawyer mythmaking: the cab-rank rule, the presumption of innocence, and the requirement for a defence barrister to ‘test the case’ of the prosecution even where the barrister suspects her client is guilty. There is a distinct feeling of boxes being ticked, of the playwright reminding herself occasionally to make sure there is a reference to this maxim, that catchphrase, the other argument she’s had in the pub (or, as Tessa says, almost in capital letters, at “every dinner party”).
With the play’s opening making it quite clear what is going to happen, we enjoy a parlour game of Guess The Rapist throughout Act 1. Initially, the play throws out a red herring: we meet Adam, a male chambers colleague, who conducts a gentle cross-examination of a sexual assault complainant. Adam is described, preposterously, as able to “recite whole sections of the Criminal Justice Act”. Good for him, we suppose, although why it would be necessary to recite that Act in particular is not entirely clear (and the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 is, in any case, far more pleasing to the ear). Ultimately, however, the plot settles on the rapist being her other chambers colleague Julian, who commits the pivotal crime. Eagle-eyed audience members get a big clue early on: Julian is posh and sexy, but bookish Adam’s class background is not stated. It is not hard to work out which of them is the baddie.
Tessa begins by sleeping with Julian on a strictly casual basis, having worked late in chambers; they “fuck on the corner sofa in his office”, Tessa tells us with orgastic delight. Later, they have sex again after a proper date, which includes prodigious drinking. After one spirited round of intercourse, Tessa goes to the bathroom to vomit (having had rather too much to drink), and is thereupon carried back to bed by Julian, who climbs on top of her and penetrates her: she is, it is clear from her telling, too drunk to consent, and he does not exactly ask first anyway. In one of the play’s only really successful moments, Comer dissociates from what is happening to her while Julian tells her nauseatingly to “just lay there and let me make love to you”. It is truly flesh-creeping, and it is well done. It is a shame about the rest of Act 1, but credit where credit is due.
It is to Suzie Miller’s credit as a playwright that we do not have to endure an entire Act 2 about Tessa plucking up the courage to report the rape. Instead, rather unexpectedly, Tessa goes immediately to the police. Act 2 – which begins with a two-year time-skip, because of court backlogs (yeah!) – depicts Julian’s trial. There is a striking and effective scene where, placed in the dock and giving evidence, Tessa gives only her answers, and we never hear the questions: Comer’s performance has her being battered from all sides by quickfire cross-examination, although inexplicably, she launches into a lecture from the witness box about how badly rape victims are treated by the courts. It is hard to imagine any judge in England permitting this.
Over time, an inconsistency emerges in Tessa’s testimony about where her hand was during the assault. The play harps on about the unreliability of memory of minor details (something that all law students and trainee lawyers are taught repeatedly), and of course, it is this minor inconsistency that is the tripwire that undoes the prosecution. Despite all of the very strong evidence against him — the consistent story from the complainant, the immediate report to the police, the clear picture of severe intoxication — Julian is acquitted. We should, I suppose, be grateful that there is no suggestion that the old boys’ network got him off; that would be a little too far even here. Instead, the play ends with Comer turning to the audience and delivering a further monologue about rape in the criminal justice system. There is a vague call for ‘change’, and the audience leaves feeling faintly depressed.
Inter Alia is a sort of spiritual successor to Prima Facie, a variation on the same themes. Both were directed by Justin Martin, and both are ostensibly about rape. Rosamund Pike (charismatic and subtle where Comer can be leaden and didactic) plays not a practising barrister, but a criminal judge called Jessica Parks. Unlike Prima Facie, the play is not a one-hander, but a three-hander, with Jessica’s husband and son played by Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot respectively (alongside two child actors, and other parts played by Pike taking both sides of a conversation).
The similarities make themselves known with obnoxious alacrity. Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia opens with a ridiculous fantasia on the court process. Rather than Comer’s simple monologue, the somewhat higher-rent production of Inter Alia has Pike’s Jessica rising out of the floor into billowing dry ice, poised with a microphone while a yowling rock soundtrack erupts from the live band behind her, as she screams “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” at the top of her lungs. I was watching the cinema broadcast at the Ritzy in Brixton, and found myself contemplating every penny of the £23.35 I had paid for the ticket. Cheaper than the actual show, but more expensive than throwing myself down the stairs.
Dreadful as this sounds (and it really was), it is at least more visually interesting than Jodie Comer munching on noodles and wittering about thoroughbreds. There is, in any case, a distinct air of knowing self-parody about the whole affair. Jessica’s liberal feminism commits her to using her position to “change how things are done”. So she says: but recounting her experience on the bench, Jessica says regretfully that she “has to allow” a certain line of questioning, “unfortunately”, or makes specious remarks about one of her cases being one of the “very few times” juries return a guilty verdict in rape cases (the conviction rate at trial is in fact around half).
As Jessica’s boilerplate feminist bona fides are subjected to the reality of her professional obligations, so too does the reality of her home life crash headlong into her ethics. In Inter Alia, it is not our protagonist Jessica who is the victim of rape. Instead, her 16-year-old son Harry encounters Amy, a girl he has a crush on, at a party. Late at night, while she lies on a sofa insensate from alcohol, he rapes her. Mercifully, we do not see this; it is instead told in half-truths and self-justifications that morph gradually into an admission of the truth.
As the story spreads on social media and Jessica realises with mounting horror that Amy’s experience is not a simple misunderstanding, Jessica is torn between defending her son as a mother, seeking justice for the victim as a woman, and carrying out the process of the courts as a lawyer. This is best expressed in a tense scene in which Jessica, discussing Henry’s defence with his barrister, finds herself repeating the very lawyer clichés that Tessa said at the start of Prima Facie: Harry is allowed to test the case, she tells herself, and test the complainant’s recall (she remembers her attacker wearing a different kind of top: maybe it was mistaken identity?). There is no need to cross the Rubicon and call Amy a liar, is there? We can still believe the victim is sincere, even if we believe only that she is sincerely wrong.
All so familiar, but this proves unsatisfying and disgusting for Jessica, as indeed it does for most laypeople. It also appears to slightly bore the writer. There is no repeat of the final few minutes of Prima Facie, where Comer’s Tessa monologues vaguely to the jury and then to the audience about how “we must change” because of “the lived experience of sexual assault” and that “we have got it all wrong”. Rosamund Pike is really very good with often quite thin material (cf. Die Another Day), and Suzie Miller is too plugged into the fashions of the moment to waste her on a mere retread.
It is the siting of the penetrative, violent male sexual impulse within Jessica’s own home that makes the play more interesting than its predecessor. The rape comes at the culmination of a potted life history for Henry, the edited highlights of his childhood and pubescence played out on stage through his mother’s eyes. The spectre of sexual threat is invoked early. We see the child Harry being taught two things by his mother: that he should be kind to women, and how to scream in the event that anyone ever tries to kidnap (and, implicitly, molest) him: an ominous early scene recounts an incident when Jessica becomes convinced the child Harry has been abducted.
The potential victim in this telling must ultimately become the actual malefactor, and in Inter Alia, the serpent in the garden is the internet. When Harry is 12, Jessica thinks she catches him watching pornography. She tries to give him a Talk, and he responds with canned lines that he has clearly learned at school, and reveals that he was not watching porn at all. But in the course of Act 2, we learn that Harry does in fact have a taste for porn – rough, violent, degrading porn, at that – and then with crushing inevitability Jessica learns through his carelessly left open laptop that he’s “in the fucking manosphere”. Surprise! Check the calendar: it’s 2025, and it’s hit ‘documentary’ Adolescence all over again. We should perhaps be grateful that there is no walk-on role from Stephen Graham.
Although the word is never actually said in Inter Alia, Harry is implied to be the hobgoblin of the modern imagination, the incel. In the course of a blazing row with her husband, Jessica demands to know why he failed to guide Harry properly, and her husband says ominously, “The rules have changed … we’re all scared of someone from our past”. He could have taught him how to treat women properly despite his own implied misbehaviour, but he admits, “I don’t know how to teach him about this.” The ‘this’ in question is, implicitly, Andrew Tate and manosphere Reels, although it is a note of perhaps unconscious ambivalence in the play that the “very rare” [sic] conviction over which Jessica presides in the opening scene is only secured because the rapist filmed the assault on his smartphone.
When Harry goes to the fateful party — established, significantly, to be the first proper party he’s ever really been invited to – his parents enjoy a night together and fuck in the kitchen, but Jessica’s flashbacks to the footage from that traumatic rape case put her off her stroke, and she is obliged to fake an orgasm. The re-emergence of the marital sexual dynamic in the absence of the son — frustrated, at least for Jessica, by images of violent sexual domination mediated by technology – brings the Oedipal tension to boiling point. The following morning, Harry confides that he “had sex” with a girl at the party, and Jessica feels a “strange pride” and asks whether she enjoyed it. It is, of course, irrelevant that he is only sixteen. The internet has re-sexualised Jessica’s marriage, but also sexualised the adolescent Harry, to disastrous effect.
Let us not dwell on whether there is a deliberate echo of Jocasta in our protagonist’s name. The play is troubling enough without that. Anyway, the Theban tragedy falls rather flat as a theme, because the playwright is not particularly interested in men (which is, of course, her prerogative). Harry the junior rapist remains an enigma, and his reasons for raping Amy are obscure. It is not that we do not get any explanation. Many are given: he’s not very popular; he didn’t plan it; he “thought she wouldn’t know”; “everyone is having sex” and he is the only one who isn’t; she was there, and he did it because he could.
To the extent he is an incel rather than just a marionette for the playwright, all are wrong. In fact, as anyone who has encountered the incel online knows, their most fervent desire is not simply to penetrate a woman – anyone can do that if they’re willing to pay — but to be desired by a woman. Even their more sinister ideas about women ‘secretly wanting’ sex must be understood as a way to satisfy the desire to be desired, not simply to obtain sexual release.
Instead, Harry’s crush on Amy is established early on. But that crush is never actually established as his reason for doing what he did. The play depicts them as having had a connection, but really, she could have been anyone. He doesn’t rape her because he sexually desires her; he rapes her to prove a point or to have had sex. This is a necessary part of the sociopolitical commonplaces we all hear now: we are all expected to believe that a rapist carries out his crime for every reason other than sexual desire, and that his victim is a stand-in for Woman as victim. Jessica tells us that in her court, she “practises listening”, but as ever, no one is particularly interested in the incel’s point of view: he stands in for something else.
This strange denial of Harry’s motivations stands in contrast to the far more realistic rape in Prima Facie: Julian simply wants to have sex with Tessa regardless of her condition, and does so. Yet this crime goes acquitted, despite Tessa being in every respect an ideal victim. At the same time, the Lifetime Original rape of Inter Alia — with many perfectly logical ways out for the defendant — culminates in a confession and a guilty plea. Indeed, the reality of rape as crime can only be touched in this artistic mode by misrepresenting its relation to the criminal justice system around it: either the rape stretches credibility, or the system around it does. Thus, a modish 2020s heteropessimism is reified as glum truth-telling about a monolithic yet ‘broken’ system of dopey male ignorance and contempt. Women in this telling are little more than butterflies to be broken on the caterpillar treads of modernity.
It is, however, somewhat reductive to suggest that the plays are ‘about rape’ or ‘about the manosphere’. Visions of grisly kitchen sink dramas should be put aside. The core concern of both plays is instead the ambivalence of the role of the woman lawyer. In England, women are now a majority in the lower ranks of both sides of the profession, and are rapidly being promoted into positions of enormous power in the system. England now has a Lady Chief Justice, and its first woman President of the Supreme Court stepped down only a few years ago; the head of the King’s Bench Division is a woman, as is the deputy head of civil justice. I do not know if Dinah Rose KC is the first woman barrister to have successfully sued The Times for defamation, but it seems probable.
Real or fictional, women lawyers tend to pay lip service to the broad feminist worldview encoded in Lady Hale’s coat of arms: omnia feminae aequissimae – women are equal to everything. (I leave it to more learned readers as to whether that is good Latin.) But what precisely is this ‘everything’ to which women are said to be ‘equal’?
Equal to the “male-defined truth” that Tessa tells us does not fit women’s “lived experience of sexual assault”; equal to a system that we are repeatedly told is not capable of doing justice, and will always protect the privileged and the wealthy? Women must drink, to be fun, to equal the men, but the drink presents a terrible danger to them, making them vulnerable to the predation of arrogant men or corrupted boys. Women must be sexy, maybe even promiscuous in the case of Tessa Ensler, but in doing so are liable to be devoured. Even the purely professional sphere offers no way out: in Inter Alia, Jessica jokingly writes off her own promotion to the bench as positive discrimination, and is shocked when her husband agrees and says he should have been picked first. Equal to what, exactly – and equal in whose eyes?
Neither play attempts a coherent answer. Tessa’s closing line that “somewhere, sometime, somehow, something must change” captures the mood: all are actors in this system, and all are tasked with upholding the principles of fair trial and due process even though it is clear that Suzie Miller’s characters do not really believe in those principles when they apply to sexual assault. Tessa states baldly during Julian’s trial that “this is not a car accident or a burglary”, and the same principles do not really apply. Well, let us accept with Tessa for argument’s sake that “we have got it all wrong”: the play seems to know that any other method will get it wronger still, but leaves that point unspoken and unresolved. The audience leaves convinced of the need for ‘change’, but none the wiser as to what that change should be – save for, presumably, gradually chipping away at the rights of the defendant. There are, of course, no risks of credulity.
Inter Alia is the wiser play because it does not chicken out of those contradictions. Jessica has to be a professional who believes in the system and in the protections for the defendant, and a feminist, and a good mother. In the end, Jessica, like Dinah Rose, finds herself upholding her part in a system that requires professional beliefs of her that contradict her stated beliefs. Unlike Tessa, though, she does choose a role at the last: the play ends with Jessica in a dreamscape, looking around for the phantom of her son in his innocence, a little boy in a yellow coat; she finds him among the trees and ushers him gently off stage, to his manhood and his penalty. She chooses to be the dutiful mother, yet not the mother who protects her son come what may, but who embraces him as he chooses to do the right thing. Perhaps all her lessons sank in somewhere — just somewhat too late for his victim.
There is a toy question on Twitter that does the rounds sometimes: what is the profession whose reputation has been most damaged by social media? Barristers usually win those polls, with academics and journalists usually running them pretty close. What really seems to be happening is that under a system of perpetual, public-facing performance, it is no longer really possible to maintain the other, court-facing, client-facing performance all lawyers must carry on to do the work at all, and to live with themselves afterwards.
Women lawyers, who already wear more masks than men, seem to struggle the most with this. They might say out of one side of their face that LGBT equality is an urgent crusade of our time while defending a country’s right to maintain marriage as a heterosexual union out of the other; they might likewise insist that everyone deserves a defence — even terrorists! even murderers! — while wondering aloud whether the presumption of innocence has had its day for crimes of sufficient gravity for women as a class. As in the plays, there is unlikely to be any kind of resolution for this. We all must get through the day somehow. We all must live with the compromises we have to make — or rather, the compromises made on our behalf by those with uneasy hearts.
Suzie Miller understands this, perhaps better than even she realises, because that is what her plays are really about: the ethics are part of the ‘modern woman’ package deal, but upholding those ethics without compromise is a far greater fantasy than the triple threat of adoring children, supportive husband and demanding career. You can ‘have it all’. Lots of women lawyers do. But what you cannot have, Suzie Miller seems to say, is ‘it all’ plus being able to sleep well at night. In this, she is probably right.
Unless, perhaps, you are Dinah Rose. I am sure the President’s Lodgings at Magdalen are very comfortable.
The National Theatre’s production of Inter Alia, starring Rosamund Pike, ran from 10 July to 13 September 2025 in the Lyttelton Theatre, and a revival ran at Wyndham’s Theatre from 19 March to 20 June 2026. Both plays are regularly available on National Theatre at Home and in cinemas nationwide through National Theatre Encore. A recording of the National Theatre’s production of Prima Facie is available on the Internet Archive.
This article was written by Ishmael Haphazard, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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Very good. Reminds me of Theodore Dalrymple's writing on literature and theatre.