Last Updated on February 15, 2026
4.0 out of 5.0 starsA study of motherhood at the psychological brink
The Unbelievers fixates on the concept of aftermath. 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 Writers’ Programme 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 Unbelievers 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 tests the audience’s sensibilities – laugh, cry, or something in between? – and this general emotional unease persists throughout the play. 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 play does away with linear chronology; scenes jump between the immediate fallout of the disappearance (days and weeks) and longer timescales (a one-year anniversary, a seven-year milestone).
The lives of family members change along these chronologies – partners come and go, the rawness of mourning swells and contracts. But Miriam is frozen in her conviction that her son will, one day, turn up. “I love my son. My son is alive”, she says, coolly. This is her reality, and the kernel of the conflict in Payne’s script.
Miriam is stuck in a rageful, timeless chamber of despair. The unwavering belief in her son’s return drives a wedge between her and the other cast members who shift through new phases of life. The creation of two temporalities in a single space is director Marianne Elliot’s (Angels in America, Death of a Salesman) most impressive achievement. The progressing timeline applied to other characters feels inaccessible to Walker, who expertly refuses to obey the dominant chronological rules. She is always looking through, not at, the people around her. She is searching for an alternative chronology – indeed, an alternative scene – where her son is not missing, where he enters from the stage wings and delivers her back into the contemporary world.
Some elements of the drama felt tactical. Miriam’s daughter Margaret’s pregnancy with an older man leads to a set-piece conversation between mother and daughter about unstable parenting and processing loss. The relationship between Margaret and this new man, a bumbling PhD student studying puffins, played with great comic timing by Harry Kershaw (Skyfall, Supreme Tweeter), felt half-baked. And Miriam’s ex-husband’s new partner – a two-dimensional party guest – became a prop for Miriam to physically vent her rage.
The most convincing performance in The Unbelievers, besides Walker’s, was that of Alby Baldwin (Hamlet Hail to the Thief) as Nancy, the child from Miriam’s first marriage. Baldwin came closest to connecting their mother’s altered timeline with the new realities of other family members. A song for their missing sibling – performed solo by Baldwin after a particularly explosive outburst from Miriam – sensitively reconnected the audience with quieter expressions of grief.
Nicola Walker is an inexorable force in a play that is unafraid to spotlight the abrasive symptoms of gut-wrenching loss. It commendably resists well-worked self-help clichés about healthy processing or moving on. The Unbelievers is relentless theatre that shuns easy resolutions and tests audiences’ nerves.
The Unbelievers runs at the Royal Court Theatre from 15th October to 29th November.
Sloane Square,
Chelsea
London
SW1W 8AS
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