'The Unbelievers' review — Nicola Walker is astonishing as a grieving mother in Nick Payne's new play

Read our review of The Unbelievers, directed by Marianne Elliott, now in performances at the Royal Court to 29 November.

Summary

• Constellations playwright Nick Payne debuts his new work at the Royal Court
• The story sees Miriam reeling from the disappearance of her teenage son
• Nicola Walker gives a raw portrayal of a mother placed in this unthinkable position
• Marianne Elliott's production has strong supporting performances from Alby Baldwin and Ella Lily Hyland

Miriam’s 15-year-old son is missing. She’s falling apart, lurching between manic episodes of lashing out at neighbours and fellow supermarket shoppers, and rigorously ensuring his bedroom is kept pristine and there’s a place laid for him at the dinner table should he walk through the door. She is emphatic he is still alive. But Oscar has been gone for seven years now, and the rest of her shattered family are starting to move on.

Constellations writer Nick Payne is an expert at burrowing into the dark, nitty-gritty corners of relationships, and the focus here is not the mystery of Oscar’s disappearance, rather how, like an atom once one proton has been removed, the entire chemistry of a family changes if it loses a person.

Though the play is uneven as a whole, in the central role of Miriam, Nicola Walker delivers an astonishing, raw portrayal of a mother navigating a terrible sea of complex emotions. Gruff and volatile one minute, flashing crocodile smiles the next, she flits unnervingly between a state of psychosis and being the practical, trousers-wearing parent, dealing with the police and other officials on the case.

The experience eventually sees Miriam regress into a petulant childlike state, while her surviving children Nancy (Alby Baldwin) and Margaret (Ella Lily Hyland) are forced to resume adult roles, pleading with their mum not to harm herself.

For a play keen to emphasise the fracturing of time, the pacing can be gruelling, with scenes like one in which Miriam and husband David (a browbeaten Paul Higgins) are given mouth swabs playing out agonisingly slowly in real time. The jumping between three timelines – the immediate aftermath, a year on, and seven years down the line – is rammed home with a stylistic tick in Marianne Elliott’s production, whereby the first line of the following scene is sometimes delivered at the end of the last.

It’s especially jarring when, towards the end of the first police visit when Oscar has been missing a mere few hours, David calls for a memorial – a suggestion we then learn belongs to the seven-years-later thread. For the first half, the tone also feels strangely off, with too much effort spent on making it something of a black comedy.

But it finds its rhythm, and, through circular conversations and frustrating dead-end clues – like the discovery of Oscar’s wallet with its contents emptied – Payne captures the cruel helplessness of being left without answers. Bunny Christie’s set visualises the endless empty hours of waiting with a police reception room in view behind the main strip of stage – a sparse, abstract portrayal of the family home. And in Elliott’s production, family members not actively involved in a scene remain visible, sitting and waiting.

Walker is supported by a strong ensemble: Baldwin’s Nancy is a gentle voice of reason; Hyland’s Margaret matures before our eyes; and Higgins’s David balances his own quiet anguish with increasing exasperation at Miriam’s unpredictability. Martin Marquez as Miriam’s first husband Karl, and Harry Kershaw as Margaret’s new boyfriend Benjamin, are vessels for the awkward, sometimes ill-fitting comedy. And there’s decent multirolling from Isabel Adomakoh Young, Lucy Thackeray and Jaz Singh Deol.

But this is very much Walker’s show, and her performance alone is worth the ticket price.

The Unbelievers is at the Royal Court to 29 November.

Photo credit: The Unbelievers (Photos by Brinkhoff Moegenburg)