BLOG: “Kindness, emotional load and the stories we carry”

Mental Health Awareness Week invites us to pause and notice the emotional weight we carry — often quietly — in our working and personal lives. For many people, especially those in demanding professions, that load can feel invisible even to ourselves. Stories, art and theatre can sometimes help us recognise what we rarely name: the strain of responsibility, the pull between work and family, and the importance of kindness, both towards others and ourselves. Watching Inter Alia offered me just such a moment of recognition.

I first watched the show at the National Theatre in 2022, with Jodie Comer delivering an unforgettable performance, and recently I saw Inter Alia,  performed by Rosamund Pike. Experiencing the two plays  in sequence highlights how powerfully both actresses capture the realities faced by women barristers and judges.

I bought the script — something I always like to do, a habit that goes back to reading countless scripts during my MA at RADA and King’s College London. A script can deliver a play to you in an afternoon, right in your living room, when all you want is a bit of quiet entertainment.

Inter alia –– a Latin phrase for “among other things” is a play about Rosamund Pike’s character Jessica Parkes a criminal judge, a mother and wife. Rosamund Pike embodies the excellence and competency of females judges in her performance whilst preparing the dinner, being intimate with her husband and also caring for her teenage son. She brilliantly portrayed the angst and the competing pressures that women take on daily but don’t mention- except perhaps quietly to one another. The character Jessica tells the audience about her history and her thoughts as she agonises over important life decisions. She lets us reflect on whether we tiptoe about hoping that our parenting is good enough whilst at the same time trying not to traumatise our children by warning them about much of what we learn on the job. Pike captured that and so much more.

The play spoke about legality and morality and touched on themes relevant in the Zeitgeist such as the manosphere. I reflected on these issues when listening to Gisele Pelicot’s book ’A Hymn to life’ which along with the script of Inter Alia I  recommended to my teenage children -not least because both illustrate the sexual world we all exist in.

What you don’t get from reading the script of Inter Alia is Rosamund Pike’s extraordinary performance. Having been a criminal barrister for over 30 years (not in silk), a First‑tier Tribunal Judge in Mental Health, and an Assistant Coroner, I understood the juggle she portrayed that night with almost painful acuity. I try to be a good lawyer, judge, coroner, wife, mother and daughter — and often feel it’s an impossible feat.

The play, centred on a criminal judge, her husband (a barrister in silk), and their teenage son. It was a story I almost wish I had written first. During my MA at RADA and King’s College London, I left with a deep desire to write plays of my own — but time has never quite allowed it. Watching Inter Alia reminded me why that ambition still sits quietly in the background, waiting for its moment.

The play meant  I  reflected on how we try to ensure our own children’s safety when we learn about the horrors of criminal cases. A diet of heavy criminal cases and sex cases gives many of those working in the profession a dose of intrusive thoughts. Something which is recognised and called vicarious trauma.

As Director of Wellbeing at Red Lion Chambers, we fund professional supervision for any member who wishes to access it. After more than 30 years immersed in crime, fatalities, and mental health, I have made supervision a regular part of my own practice. It has become an essential professional tool in managing my wellbeing and sustaining the work I do.

The play was a masterclass in how females in high pressures jobs literally juggle all these roles when they are working whilst also being mothers and partners/wives. We go to work, we prepare our work, we do our work, we manage a family home and we cook and cater for friends and family while seemingly trying not to mention it too much; except perhaps to our other half.

This was a play about the competing pressures of work on a couple and how women often deal with the emotional load whether their husband is or isn’t as successful as them if they work in a demanding career. It also highlights in one’s own mind how helpful our other half is.

It wasn’t just a play about lawyers, although the themes are certainly easier to recognise if you’re a criminal practitioner or a judge. I suspect it will resonate just as strongly with anyone working in a demanding profession while trying to balance the weight of that responsibility with the realities of family life.

Suzie Miller is an exceptional writer, and I found myself preferring Inter Alia to Prima Facie — perhaps because Prima Facie, brilliant as Jodie Come  was, felt too close to the many sex cases I have dealt with over the years. Sometimes I think theatre offers a quiet form of therapy: a space where you can sit with difficult themes in contemplation, with less trauma but with more culture, and allow the ideas to settle in their own time.

Inter Alia is a play  well worth seeing to understand the challenges women face as a working parent but it also homes in on rape and consent and how young people grapple with these issues in an online world. I particularly enjoyed the exploration of judging ‘kindfully’ - an issue I have worked hard to promote. How a judge can support others and act compassionately is certainly the law at its best. The play is not without its humour (my sister who had invited me along as her guest) laughed and she isn’t one for legal jokes.

The cases we deal with in crime stay with us in one way or another — this play captures that truth. It also shows how work that is deeply rewarding can, at times, overshadow family life. Whether my children will ever get around to reading the script I’ve left out for them, I don’t know, but perhaps this review will prompt them to dig it out.

Valerie Charbit, Wellbeing Director at RLC