The Unbelievers at Royal Court Theatre

"When a teenage boy disappears without explanation, his loved ones are left scrambling in a void of incomprehensible loss. How, the play asks, does a family become fractured by differing responses to tragedy? What hope is there for togetherness, for continuity, when despair divides as powerfully as it binds? Writer Nick Payne (Constellations, The Sense of an Ending) a Royal Court Young Writer's Program alumnus returns to the theatre with this exploration of motherhood under extreme circumstances."

"Like Constellations (2012), his first Royal Court production, The Unbelievers manipulates linear chronology to examine the aftershocks of a sudden, earth-splitting loss. The play begins with the missing boy's family Nicola Walker (Spooks, The Split), as his mother, Miriam, Paul Higgins (The Thick Of It, Line of Duty) as his father, David, and Ella Lily Hyland (Black Doves) as his sister. It is the week following the disappearance."

"Miriam has just returned from Beverly, East Yorkshire, after a reported sighting of her child by (what turn out to be) internet provocateurs. She frantically recounts the bizarre details of this trip staking out the record shop where her son was apparently sighted, breaking into her own car using a garden gnome. The absurdity of these details test the audience's sensibilities laugh, cry, or something in between?"

"Sometimes jokes felt misplaced, but mostly it was Walker's skilled portrayal of an erratically grieving mother that forbade the audience from leaning too strongly into a completely innocent gag. It was as if we, like her family and friends, were in danger of misreading her. Of inducing a tirade. Of disrespecting her pain. Walker's spiral into increasingly incomprehensible despair was the central dramatic arc."

The Unbelievers centers on aftermath after a teenage boy disappears without explanation. His mother Miriam, father David and sister navigate the week following the disappearance. Miriam returns from Beverley after a reported sighting and recounts bizarre behavior—staking out a record shop and breaking into her own car with a garden gnome. The script manipulates chronology, jumping between moments to expose the aftershocks of sudden loss. Absurd incidents create emotional unease as humor and grief collide. Nicola Walker's portrayal of Miriam traces an escalating, erratic spiral of grief that destabilizes family dynamics and becomes the play's central dramatic arc.

Read at www.london-unattached.com