Rosamund Pike is immaculate as a judge staring down her own hypocrisy in Inter Alia

After playing a delightfully brittle matriarch in Saltburn (2023), Rosamund Pike paints an infinitely more complex portrait of motherhood in this brilliantly tense, emotive drama. Inter Alia is playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin’s follow-up to their West End and Broadway hit Prima Facie. Like that play, which starred Jodie Comer as a young barrister, this one also focuses on sexual assault and the injustices of the legal system. But this time the tone is less crusading, more complexifying, as a female judge is forced to stare down her own hypocrisy.

It's been 15 years since Pike’s last major stage role but you'd never guess it from the way she commands the National Theatre stage as Jessica, who presides over horrific rape trials with fierce compassion. She’s got a compelling naturalness that draws you right into her family kitchen, or her private office, or into the karaoke booth where she swaggers through Shania Twain with her female lawyer friends. But it’s not as easy as it looks. The stage is set up like a rock gig, thick with haze, soundtracked with electric guitar, reminding us that Jessica is a showman. She might seem relaxed, witty, accomplished, but both her personal and professional lives require constant effort and performance. And as she switches effortfully between courtroom strictness and tender domesticity, Pike’s face shows all the strains of working motherhood thrumming behind her polished exterior.

Unlike the one-woman production of Prima Facie, Inter Alia shows us the men that Jessica spends her days accommodating. Her husband Michael (Jamie Glover) is a barrister who struggles to live in the shadow of her success, and requires constant, careful appeasement. By contrast, her son Harry (Jasper Talbot) is, at first, her project, her attempt at creating a “good man”. She gives him lessons in consent on a windswept beach, and impromptu bedtime lectures on the ills of pornography. But how can she make a dent in his bulletproof shell of teenage apathy and embarrassment, or fight against the invisible influences that seep in, through his phone and laptop?

Like Netflix’s smash hit Adolescence, Inter Alia is calculated to strike fear into the hearts of parents (of boys, especially). Still, it’s softer, too, offering a sympathetic portrait of a teenager sent astray by pressuring school friends and low self-worth. Miller’s play is treading a delicate line here, between empathising with and excusing this story’s male abuser.

Sometimes, it teeters dangerously on the edge of sentimentality. But it also says something profound about motherhood and memory, and the way that lost moments from childhood pattern onto the present. Jessica is haunted by guilt, having lost Harry: once in the playground, aged four, then again, more damningly, as a teenager who’s ventured places she can’t reach.

Inter Alia’s impact builds and builds until it’s almost unbearable. That’s a testament to Martin's production, which uses jagged bursts of light and sound to turn this intimate story into a swaggering epic – while Miriam Buether’s design creates a stage that feels like the contents of Jessica’s brain, childhood scenes emerging from the blackness. But most of all, it's down to Pike’s immaculately judged performance, as the principles Jessica has built her life upon start to crumble to dust.

At the National Theatre until 13 September