Nick Payne is the top-drawer dramatist who expanded minds with his multiverse-traversing Constellations. His latest play explores how a mother’s mind implodes when her teenage son disappears.
In Marianne Elliot’s somewhat tiring production, Nicola Walker conveys every parent’s greatest nightmare with a fevered obsession. Her Miriam cuts a solitary figure even when she is surrounded by her fractured family, which consists of her hand-wringing husband David (Paul Higgins), their daughter Margaret (Ella Lily Hykand) and Margaret’s half-sister Nancy (Alby Baldwin).
The clear-headed urgency with which Miriam conducted her initial search atrophies into a suspended state of bewilderment, but also a determination to either find her son or wait for him, for no matter how long.
Payne is a master at keeping his audience on its toes. The final line of dialogue in one scene often turns out to be the first spoken line in the next. In this disorienting way the narrative vaults forward in time and back until a portrait of a family coping – or not – with the disappearance of their number fully emerges.
There is, thank goodness, the occasional oasis of levity such as when Margaret’s academic boyfriend Benjamin (an enjoyably eccentric Harry Kershaw) hogs the conversation during a family reunion with details on the life cycle of the puffin.
However, much like its central character, the play is suspended in a heightened state of distress which eventually becomes as wearing to watch as it must be to live.
The Unbelievers
Royal Court
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