A triumphant, freewheeling turn by Rosamund Pike

Suzie Miller’s physically challenging, hard-hitting but witty play marked a triumphant return to the London stage for Pike after 15 years away when it was staged at the National last year .

This transfer feels slightly tighter, the ending tweaked and the architecture of a West End playhouse pulling the story and Pike’s bravura central turn into closer focus.

The actress is a whirlwind as Jess faces down defendants, mounts a lavish dinner party, lets rip at a girls’ karaoke night, and even engages in a marital sex scene – in which her husband’s midlife crisis guitar acts as a phallic prop - that manages to be both erotic and painfully awkward.

Onstage throughout, Pike is in constant motion, slipping in and out of outfits, catching a casually flung lemon, and keeping up a sometimes amused, sometimes emotionally frayed commentary for the audience on how her gender affects her life.

The role plays to her dramatic skills but also a flair for physical comedy, as when a clothese iron spurting steam becomes a stand-in for her bumptious barrister husband.

Jess is first seen wigged and gowned, yowling into a microphone like a rockstar standup, as legal phrases flash on flanking gauze screens and a guitarist and drummer (later revealed as her husband and son) thrash behind her.

Miller, who also wrote the legal monologue Prima Facie that brought Jodie Comer back to the theatre , was a lawyer in the past, and exaggerates the performative nature of court proceedings to immediately compelling effect.

Jess has done all the emotional lifting in Harry’s childhood, the little boy evoked through a series of yellow anoraks and occasionally a child actor.

We feel her fear of pedophile abduction when he goes briefly missing, her fury when he’s bullied at school, her excruciating embarrassment when having the first “porn chat” with him aged 12, including the symbolic use of a large pepper grinder.

Her protective sense of him as a potential victim shifts into something more troubling when he’s accused of assault at a party by a girl.

Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia deals with the fact that the system remains rigged against women, particularly the legal system, where convictions for rape and sexual assault are rare and victim-blaming common.

And as with the earlier play, the price of Miller’s insider information is the occasional impenetrable thicket of legalese.

She and Martin are adroit, though, at sudden shifts of mood, from comedy into something stark.

Glover, who also played Michael at the National, brings great power to the scene where the cocksure father realises his potential culpability in his son’s attitude to women.

McAlinden, who has taken over his role from Jasper Talbot, brings a shambling awkwardness to Harry, as if this man-boy isn’t fully in control of his own body.

The two men provide sterling support but it’s Pike’s night - a triumphant, freewheeling turn from an actress at the height of her powers.

No further questions, your honour.

Booking to 20 June, wyndhamstheatre.co.uk .