‘It’s now in 48 countries’: Australian playwright follows international hit with companion work

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It was understandable that Australian lawyer turned playwright Suzie Miller was nervous when her new play, Inter Alia, opened in London a few weeks ago.

“This one I was nail-biting about because there was so much expectation,” the Olivier and Awgie award winner says.

“A lot of the men I know would say they’re a feminist ally, but it’s not enough.” Suzie Miller

The phenomenal success of Miller’s 2019 play Prima Facie raised the stakes. Staged around the world after success in Australia, that play is about a brilliant criminal barrister who, having defended men accused of sexual assault, has her own devastating experience of it.

Miller’s new play is a companion work that centres on a compassionate judge, played by Rosamund Pike of Gone Girl and Saltburn fame, who faces a shattering allegation of sexual assault within her family.

She need not have worried whether it would find an audience. Inter Alia is another hit, with the National Theatre season selling out after four and five-star reviews. The Guardian called it “a searing commentary on the justice system”; London Theatre described it as “a scorching drama, merciless in its dissection of our broken system, but deeply compassionate towards the people at its heart”.

National Theatre Live screenings were watched in UK cinemas by 67,000 people.

Inter Alia (a Latin legal term for “among other things”) follows the remarkable impact of Prima Facie (“at first sight” or “on the face of it”).

It was such a shattering portrayal of how women are treated by the legal system that as soon as it debuted in London, with an acclaimed performance by Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), a judge contacted Miller to say she wanted to rewrite her instructions to sexual assault juries using the text of the play.

Since then, the filmed performance has been used as a teaching tool for judges in the UK, barristers who visit British schools to talk about consent and, soon, Australian police.

“It’s now in 48 countries, which is amazing to me,” Miller says in Sydney. “This thing that I wrote in my quiet little dark studio is in Iran even.”

Other countries staging the play include Turkey, Iceland, Italy, Denmark, New Zealand, Brazil and Norway. In theatre-loving Germany, it has had 20 productions.

According to the National Theatre, more than 1.5 million people have watched the filmed performance in cinemas, including 880,000 in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Comer, who won Olivier and Tony awards for the London and New York seasons, is returning for a UK tour next year that Miller says sold out in 10 minutes.

After turning Prima Facie into a novel, she wrote the screenplay for a film that director Susanna White (Our Kind of Traitor) started shooting in London this month with Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) playing the barrister.

Miller says Inter Alia came from a recognition that sexual assault is a community issue, not just a legal problem.

She wanted the play to address how boys are affected by the proliferation of online pornography, the manosphere and casual misogyny at schools that can radicalise them about gender – an issue also addressed in British crime drama Adolescence that has been a hit on Netflix this year.

“Women try to raise these boys as best they can with feminist ideals and understanding about respecting women but at a certain point they become young men and they enter into their peer group and they hear a different version of reality,” Miller says. “So they stop confiding in mothers and they look to men to be their mentors.

“A lot of the men I know would say they’re a feminist ally, but it’s not enough.”

Miller says her call to action is to say to “men – godfathers, older cousins, older brothers, sports mates, sports coaches – you have an active role to play in actually raising young men and interrogating that bro zone with them and for them [so they don’t] participate in that trajectory towards disrespect.”

Miller is planning a third play that deals with juries and restorative justice.

But, first, she has the novel version of Inter Alia to finish and more film and TV scripts to write.

For director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!), Miller is working on Everything I Ever Knew, based on a true story about a woman who discovers, after 25 years, that the father of her eldest son was an undercover police officer.

She is also writing film and TV projects with Lena Dunham, about a group of young barristers in London, David E. Kelley, about the US Supreme Court, and Australian director Justin Kurzel.

National Theatre Live’s Inter Alia is screening in cinemas on September 25.

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