Nicola Walker is a brilliant TV actor: her sullen, sarcastic charisma brings an edge to sundry MOR terrestrial Brit dramas – we’re talking Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, River, The Split, Annika – in which her career has flourished.
But even though she has done some great stuff on stage – notably her excellent turn in Ivo van Hove’s landmark production of A View from the Bridge – I’m not sure Nicola Walker has ever truly successfully brought her innate Nicola Walkerness to bear in a theatre role.
Until now.
Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing.
The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, when Walker’s Miriam is terse and snappy but fundamentally reasonable in both her grief and her burning desire to make progress on the case. There’s one year on, where things are beginning to slip with her. The play opens with a scene from this timeline in which a somewhat out of it Miriam is tending to a wounded hand which has arisen from a complicated series of events related to an implausible tip off that Oscar had been spotted in Beverley, near Hull. And finally there’s seven years on, where Miram’s grief has metastasised into something truly monstrous. ‘I like my wounds’ she declares as she eviscerates everyone who urges her to move on, her behaviour now spiteful and unhinged.
It is a remarkable performance from Walker, affecting, upsetting and often savagely hilarious as Miriam allows herself to be wholly consumed by her need to find Oscar. She is increasingly detached from worldly needs in favour of serving as her vanished son’s high priestess on earth, ready to punish… well, the unbelievers, who would give up on him.
Walker is dominant but Miriam is just one figure at the heart of a surprisingly sprawling cast. At the core of it are her two other children, pragmatic Maragaret (Ella Lily Hyland) and more spiritually inclined Nancy (Alby Baldwin). And there are her two ex husbands: Karl (Martin Marquez), Nancy’s dad, turned dithering priest (thematically important to the play); and David (Paul Higgins), Margaret and Oscar’s dad, who has just split from Miriam in the earliest timeline and whose nervy sensitivity stands in stark contrast to her utter singlemindedness. They’re characters in their own rights, with their own lives and loves and ways of dealing with grief. But they’re also utterly at the mercy of Miriam’s all-consuming inability to move on.
Payne’s structure will surely be a sticking point to some: the out-of-order scenes feel like a sort of random anthology of grief for a while. But for my money they do eventually coalesce into something wonderful. A late-ish scene where Nancy, Nancy’s girlfriend Mia (Isobel Adomakoh Young) and Miram attempt to contact Oscar via a seance is the one that really sold me on The Unbelievers. What happens totally wrongfoots you, but it’s beautifully written and the point at which I realised this was really a play about human faith and the fundamentally unknowable nature of the world.
Heavyweight director Marianne Elliott approaches the play elegantly and sympathetically. Bunnie Christie’s set is divided into two, with the foreground Miriam’s home and the background s sort of existential waiting room where then unused cast linger between their scenes. There are no splashy set changes, but there is beautifully evocative lighting from Jack Knowles that offers some delineation between scenes, ever changing shades of twilight.
There is a suggestion hinted at early, made more explicit late on, but never really followed through that Miriam is somehow experiencing all these events at once. Presumably this would be because she has had some sort of full-on breakdown, but the idea felt confusingly underexplored (that or I failed to get something about the play). For the most part, though, I was a believer in The Unbelievers. Payne’s new play needs a bit of time to show itself, but Walker’s molten performance grabs you instantly – together they paint a haunting but disarmingly funny portrait of grief turning into something else, that elicits a career best performance from its star.
