London's stages are host to many haunted characters right now. There's Hiran Abeysekera's Hamlet at the National, Alicia Vikander's Ellida in Lady from the Sea at the Bridge and just about everyone in The Weir at the Harold Pinter. Now here is Nicola Walker as Miriam in The Unbelievers: a woman whose life dropped into freefall the day Oscar, her 15-year-old son, went missing.
Nick Payne's elliptical new play plunges us into Miriam's purgatorial state as she is both sustained and tortured by her deeply held belief that Oscar is still alive. Time bends and warps as moments from the day he disappeared collide with incidents years later: the passage of time makes no sense to Miriam who is, like the stopped clock on the wall of Bunny Christie's set, unable to move forward. As in his award-winning drama Constellations, Payne is fascinated by the nature of time -- the way it seems to stretch, circle or vanish -- only here the governing factor is psychological: grief has its own rules and timetable.
Marianne Elliott's beautifully acted production and Christie's expressive set design draw us into Miriam's agonising limbo. Scenes cut across one another out of chronological order. Key moments take on the quality of vivid memories: an initial visit from the police; an excruciating social meeting with her daughter's boyfriend and her ex-husband's new partner; an attempt to pray with her first husband, now a vicar. Other characters hover in a liminal waiting room behind a glass wall, before stepping into the sketched-out living room -- a table, a few chairs -- where Walker's Miriam remains throughout, spiralling into obsession.
Walker, who is superb, invests the role with the quality of a heroine from Greek tragedy, driven into an extreme of longing that, to the outside world seems increasingly untenable, but feels entirely reasoned and ineluctable to her. Walker is searing in her raw intensity and harrowing in the uglier expressions of pain, as Miriam rages at anyone who suggests moving on, and demonstrates scant understanding of the trauma of her relatives. "I like my wounds," she cries, dismissing her concerned family's pleas to stay for a memorial service to Oscar rather than pursue a potential sighting in Ghent.
It's a play that shows great empathy for Miriam, but Payne also pays sympathetic heed to other characters' personal nightmares, and the cast manage skilfully the stark emotional shifts demanded by the pinballing timeline. Paul Higgins excels as Oscar's worn-out, anxious dad, scrabbling for facts. Miriam's younger daughter, Margaret, partners up and gets pregnant, perhaps too quickly; the older daughter, Nancy, seeks to contact Oscar in the afterlife. Ella Lily Hyland and Alby Baldwin give sensitive, nuanced performances as young people struggling with the loss of their brother and, in a sense, their mother.
What does hold the play back is that the framing of characters' attempts to grapple with the inexplicable sometimes feels too strategic and rather obvious: a séance, a discussion of religious faith. There is, naturally, a relentlessness to the drama too, which Payne breaks up with comedy, again sometimes rather awkwardly. But at its best, it is intensely moving: there's a heartbreaking speech from Walker's Miriam near the end. And it shares with The Weir the premise that the communal space of theatre is a good place to sit, together, with the unknowable; this too is a play about love, with a glimmer of hope at the end.