MUM-POLE OF THE BAILEY….?
I paused overnight before writing this, to see if a bout of two-star irritation might fade. After all, lawyer-playwright Suzie Miller gave us the astonishing monologue Prima Facie, when Jodie Comer kept audiences riveted to their seats as a barrister who defends rape cases and then is a victim. This one is still mainly a solo by Rosamund Pike, speaking her inner and outer thoughts with elegant division between the two under Justin Martin’s sure direction. Again ,as in Prima Facie our heroine-narrator leaps on and off tables with engaging vigorous physicality, but this time there are showy projections (a Buether design). and significant moments with Jamie Glover as the husband and an excellent Jasper Talbot as a teenage son (his younger selves also appear).
Pike is Jessica, married to a QC, herself newly a judge and pleased with the role. She talks of bringing female intuition, nuanced listening and empathy to the job, unlike the despised old male dinosaurs on the bench. But ‘inter alia’ (meaning among-other-things) indicates that as a woman, wife and mother she struggles to balance her domestic and emotional life with work, while adoring her only child, Harry and being careful not to upset her husband with her seniority.
Well, stop me if you’ve heard that complaint of successful women before: we all have. It’s fashionable. That sense of deja-vu upper-middle fashionability is where my above irritation began: Jessica is forever fretting about the shopping, dragging out the ironing-board for her son’s party shirt and adjourning a rape trial to answer his fretful texts about it. So, generally cosplaying the oppressed hausfrau, as if to tell us that a judge and a QC wouldn’t afford a bit of domestic help (none is mentioned). The other irritation – though it shows the interesting research among judges which Miller dutifully did – is her rather bumptious self-satisfaction in the early court scenes. She’s very “My court my rules”, as one flashed projection puts it, and loves putting down male defence barristers. Her best friend, unseen, is another female judge. They do karaoke together at one point , yowling ‘simply the best!”.
But none of that would matter – it’s quite good to dislike a character, it means they’re real, and Pike is terrific; she is given a spontaneous sex interlude with Glover, her response interrupted only briefly by her memory of a rape video in court (that does feel real: it must be hell). But what got on my nerves, as a mother, was the howling improbability of how dim she is about her son. Her early terror is of paedophile kidnap, reasonable given the cases she sees, but absurd is the remembered scene where on a beach walk she panics at little Harry’s liking for a male teaching-assistant. Without a scrap of that boasted ability to “listen”, she trains him how to shout aloud “don’t touch my willy!’. How to confuse a small child. Even more hopeless is when, rather than check what he’s actually watching aged 14, she assumes it’s hard porn rather than just a forbidden video game. So she starts going on and on about penis and breast improbabilities, and how he needn’t worry . When, at last 18 but with no regular girlfriend yet, he goes to a ‘house party’ and returns appallingly drunk saying he’s had sex, she giggles with a frisson of actual motherly pride. Not a thought for the equally drunk girl; when precious Harry is asked whether he texted Amy next day he sneers “that’s so last century!”, and it’s only her husband who murmurs that hey, a gentleman would have done so. In other words, neither of these muppets has ever had a conversation about how a decent person treats a fellow human being they have been that intimate with, even if it was fleeting.
I suspected Miller intends the play as a statement of indignation on behalf of successful modern clever upmarket mothers doing-it-all while struggling against the manosphere. But actually it works better as a lament for a whole generation of hip, cool permissive parents who shrug “it’s the culture” at a Gen Z child who deserves to be taken more seriously, and who shrug playfully at heavy drinking and casual sex. It works also as a clever portrait of one individual, self-important nitwit. Somewhere not far from the level of Diary of a Nobody. This is a woman who can selfrighteously sit on the Bench hearing about sex crimes against drunk girls day after day, without it ever occurring to her to warn her strapping teenage son about how easily it happens, even to normally quite nice boys, when they drink too much and are urged on by loutish peers and are, face it, physically stronger than the girl.
She finds the truth of that night hard to believe as the story develops, for all the vaunted “listening”. When the inevitable accusations and defences happen , she turns on her husband, who she considers should have trained Harry better. And when the poor man gives way to his own distress about it all, she the supposed empath is astonished to find that he too is vulnerable. Not that good at nuanced listening, then…
The end, however, redeemed it for me. Because Miller, for all her empathy with top-class legal women, bravely offers us the possibility that the moral compass of a teenager might actually be more reliable than that of a proud bewigged judge.
Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 13 sept
Rating 4
In cinemas uk and Ireland from 18 sept, internationally from 25 sept
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