The Unbelievers reviews round-up starring Nicola Walker at the Royal Court Theatre

"Nicola Walker gives the performance of her career in Nick Payne’s elliptical drama about a mother’s grief darkening into fanaticism"

"Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t quite the home run his last one Constellations was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting via a deadpan grumpiness filter 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 much darker and more disturbing."

"It is a truly remarkable performance from Walker, affecting, upsetting and often savagely hilarious as Miriam allows herself to be wholly consumed by her need to find Oscar."

"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 pretty wonderful."

"Heavyweight director Marianne Elliott approaches the play elegantly and sympathetically."

"Payne’s new play needs a bit of time to show itself, but Walker’s molten performance grabs you instantly"

"Nicola Walker is blisteringly good in The Unbelievers"

"The Split actor is terrific as a mother reeling in the wake of the disappearance of her teenage son"

"Artistic Director David Byrne’s programme cannily interweaves more formally audacious work with guaranteed big hitters and this latest play from Nick Payne confidently straddles both categories, starring as it does Nicola Walker (The Split, Unforgiven) in a performance of blistering potency."

"If the process of grief itself isn’t linear, this family’s excruciating limbo-like state of non-grief is anything but a straight line"

"Marianne Elliott’s clever production divides the stage into front and back sections, which designer Bunny Christie dresses with deliberate anonymity."

"Payne allows shards of dark humour to leaven the gloom, often from Walker’s incredulous Miriam and increasingly from Hyland’s straight-talking Margaret"

"A tour de force performance by Nicola Walker"

"Nick Payne’s play about a missing child is empathetic and sincere, with a powerhouse performance from Nicola Walker"

"An astonishing performance of rage and grief from Nicola Walker is at the core of Nick Payne’s play, about the family of a 15-year-old boy who has gone missing."

"This is a sincere, empathetic and surprisingly funny work from the award-winning writer of Constellations and We Live In Time, but it’s also relentless and lacking in tonal variety."

"Marianne Elliott’s production is well cast and sharply focused but also heavy-handed in places. It runs for 105 uninterrupted minutes: frankly, an interval would be a relief."

"The dynamics between the siblings and between Miriam and her exes – including her occasional urge to have sex with one or other of them – are well observed. But Payne’s determination to lean into the awkward comedy that accompanies even the worst tragedies sometimes topples into clumsiness."

"This remains a tour de force from Walker with strong, subtle support from Higgins, Marquez, Hyland and Baldwin."

"Nicola Walker is terrific as a mother in the grip of grief in The Unbelievers"

"Walker’s star turn has ensured a sell-out run, but it’s not enough to save Nick Payne’s fragmented drama"

"The Unbelievers is eminently watchable and Walker... compelling as the desolate, unrelenting Miriam. But while her star turn has rightly ensured a sell-out run for Marianne Elliott’s assured production, it’s not enough to convert the sceptical to the play itself."

"Walker brilliantly conveys a combative, alienating defiance – deploying her rare aura of formidable intensity and gift for sardonic incredulity."

"But even allowing for too many incidental details and moments of humour, there’s too indistinct a sense of the boy himself, his personality, his mates. Real-life cases of this ilk can break your heart. Despite the bravura lead performance, I was left unmoved."

"Nicola Walker is heartbreaking as mother tortured by grief"

"Nick Payne’s purgatorial drama at the Royal Court is relentless — but at its best, intensely moving"

"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."

"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"

"Paul Higgins excels as Oscar’s worn-out, anxious dad"

"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... But at its best, it is intensely moving"

"Raw and committed performances"

"Nicola Walker is fiercely compelling in Nick Payne’s elusive new drama"

"The writing also, despite an astute and sensitive production from Marianne Elliott, has an air of contrivance. The dialogue, although sometimes spiked with bitter wit, often feels effortful, with the themes and characters arranged with geometrical precision. But the performances, from a cast led by Nicola Walker, are raw and committed, and there are moments that bristle with feeling, choked back like shards of glass."

"Religion, the paranormal and the insidious toxin of online trolls, lurid headlines and conspiracy theorists are all part of Payne’s formula"

"The relentlessness of their ordeal is underlined by Bunny Christie’s design, which foregrounds the family home but sets behind it, visible through a partition, a kind of eternal, purgatorial waiting room where characters sit, patiently resigned, between scenes."

"Walker, clenched, aridly funny, furious and utterly desolate, is fiercely compelling."

"In a way, despite the careful construction of ideas and oppositions, it ultimately feels as though Payne’s play is equally frustrated in its attempt to grasp at substance. But it does leave behind a definite ache."

"It’s an intermittently engrossing, well-acted and slickly staged look at loss, grief and how closure is impossible without answers. However, in presenting the inexplicable and unfathomable, Payne’s writing and Marianne Elliott’s production tend to be as elliptical and inconclusive as the subject matter."

"Eschewing a linear timeframe, the scenes depicting Miriam (Nicola Walker) and her fractious relationships with her ex-husbands and remaining grown-up children are jumbled, sometimes confusingly, across a seven-year period, often bleeding into each other."

"... few actors are as adept as Walker at suggesting anguish roiling away under a matter-of-fact surface. That anguish does break through occasionally"

"Paul Higgins and Martin Marquez offer sensitive, bleakly funny portraits of Miriam’s understandably bewildered ex-husbands, and Ella Lily Hyland and Baldwin are wonderfully natural and emotionally true as her contrasting children"

"The tonal inconsistencies may be deliberate, but they make for a frustrating experience overall."

"The Unbelievers takes a while to build up a head of theatrical steam; in terms of writing, structure and staging, it isn’t sufficiently focused to be really satisfying"

" Nicola Walker is thoroughly persuasive"

"The playwright Nick Payne brings his latest study of motherhood and loss, starring the Spooks actor, to the Royal Court"

"It’s a curiously static piece. Nicola Walker... is thoroughly persuasive as a woman who has exhausted all her inner resources and has little left to offer but anger, resentment and studied sarcasm. There’s a memorable final scene where, as the family gathers, memories of the son she has lost are overwhelming. But by toying with the chronology — which is even more slippery than in We Live in Time — Payne makes it hard to share in the anguish of Miriam’s family."

"The Thick of It’s Paul Higgins impresses as Miriam’s fragile husband David. Ella Lily Hyland and Alby Baldwin make a strong pairing as daughters Margaret and Nancy."

"It’s always a bad sign, however, when you catch yourself admiring the actors’ technique rather than caring about the characters they represent."

"Odder still, the production, icily directed by Marianne Elliott, often strikes a jarringly comic note. Gallows humour may well be a useful defence mechanism, but some of the passages have a touch of Abigail’s Party."

"Nicola Walker grapples with family tragedy in a flat drama"

"Marianne Elliott directs Nick Payne’s tonally uneven play about a missing son that comes with ill-fitting moments of comedy"

"There are strong stand-alone moments but something feels off, with a flatness of tone and an injection of ridiculous comedy that chips away at the family tragedy, shrivelling its effect. Scenes that dramatise the endless, unknowing wretchedness of Oscar’s disappearance are followed up by humour that contains an edge of hysteria, and drives the play from tautness to bagginess, from depth of feeling into wacky territory."

"Actors seem stranded too, trying to hold up characters that do not always feel real"

"Dramatically, it is static, both downstage and at the back of Bunny Christie’s set"

"You learn next to nothing about who these people are, from where they live to what Miriam and David do for a living."

"This is unquestionably dramatic subject matter with resonances to so many news stories on disappeared children, but it just does not cut deeply enough."