The Unbelievers review – Nicola Walker grapples with family tragedy in a flat drama

Royal Court theatre, London
Marianne Elliott directs Nick Payne’s tonally uneven play about a missing son that comes with ill-fitting moments of comedy

Nick Payne is an exemplar of this theatre’s mission to nurture new writers. It was here he started out, on the young writers’ programme. Now a starry alumnus, he completes a career full circle by premiering a play on its main stage for the first time. Is it a triumphant return? Not exactly, although he has gathered a garlanded company around him, including director Marianne Elliott, another Royal Court returnee.

Nicola Walker plays Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her son, Oscar, who vanished when he was not yet 16. The play’s indirect inquiries into loss (When does disappearance turn into permanent loss? Is moving on the same as giving up?) feel very much in keeping with Payne’s oeuvre on stage and screen. So does its cut-up structure that shuttles non-chronologically through time, not unlike his 2012 play Constellations. Scenes flip from the hopeful beginnings of a police investigation to false leads followed ever more desperately by Miriam, to seven years later when her ex-husband David (Paul Higgins) suggests a memorial as some form of closure.