A powerful story of a family shattered by the disappearance of a 15-year-old child, lifted by the strength of its performances.Rating
Excellent!
A much-loved 15-year-old boy, Oscar, doesn’t come home from school one day, leaving his parents and two older sisters bewildered and bereft. Police investigations draw a blank. The play opens as his mother returns to the family home a year later after pursuing a disturbing crank call of a possible sighting. Scenes jump around across a seven-year period as the nature of the pain of Oscar’s absence mutates. The broken timeline becomes a metaphor for the family’s shattered, disjointed lives in the wake of his disappearance.
This is a powerful play exploring loss, sadness and hope. Nicola Walker as the mother, Miriam, is at the heart of the production, expertly playing a character who lurches from pragmatism to obsession. She is a woman of great passions, bright, bold and funny, who loses her grasp on reality, slipping into bitterness and cruelty in her self-centred grief. Her performance is excellent, building from confusion to compulsion, sparing no one around her. But the character of Miriam is a bit flat. She exists only in the vacuum of grief, and would benefit from more backstory. We never find out, for example, what she does for a living. There are tremendous performances by the two children, Ella Lily Hyland as Margaret and Alby Baldwin as Nancy. And much of the power of the play comes from their confusion and grief at being left by a brother and emotionally deserted by a mother too wrapped up in her own sadness.
The staging reflects ideas of lives being paused. The back half of the stage is a waiting room, where the actors sit in character waiting for their cues – replicating the waiting of the family whose questions aren’t answered. The front half is their home, minimally depicted by an easy chair and a table.
This is an emotional watch, with moments of levity somewhat heavily provided mainly by the peripheral characters – a boyfriend who’s mad about puffins, a spiritualist who can’t turn off his phone, and a rather silly girlfriend who tries to sell life insurance. There are attempts to broaden the story by incorporating elements of religious faith (Miriam’s first husband has found God and become a vicar), and spiritualism (Nancy and Miriam both explore it as a way to reach out to Oscar), which feel artificial and a bit aimless but provide a welcome break for what becomes a torrent of obsessive grief from the mother.
The Unbelievers is a slightly frustrating watch. There are moments of powerful and raw emotion from an excellent cast. But, despite an attempt to mask it with the jumping timeline, the story doesn’t really go anywhere. Having said that, the slightly limp storytelling and characterisation are masked by some truly great performances, which stir up the emotions and serve up a powerful night at the theatre.
Writer: Nick Payne
Director: Marianne Elliott
Designer: Bunny Christie
The Unbelievers runs at the Royal Court Theatre until Saturday 29 November
