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. As the lad’s mother Miriam she is outwardly calm, even bleakly humorous, but also as tightly sprung as a mousetrap, ready to snap and wound those closest to her at any moment.
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. Miriam and her family soldier on through the days and years, suspended between hope and despair, permanently braced for her next “mental” meltdown. 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.
We first see Miriam bleeding from the hand, sheepishly explaining that she had to bash in the window of her locked car with a garden gnome on a visit to Beverley in Yorkshire. Her son, Oscar, had supposedly been spotted there, by the sort of crank who obsesses over the cases of missing persons, especially children. The disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the death of Nicola Bulley come irresistibly to mind, as we see trolls, charlatans and grifters swarm over the slow-moving police investigation.
The geography of Miriam’s family unfolds slowly. She had separated from her second husband David (a wrung-out and beleaguered Paul Higgins) a month before Oscar vanished from school – something David fears will count against them if they make a TV appeal, earning himself another lash of withering scorn from Miriam.
Together they have a daughter, Mags (impressive newcomer Ella Lily Hyland), whose growth away from the family unit brings her into repeated conflict with her mother. Unsentimentally, Walker shows us that Miriam’s implacable sorrow blinds her to the same hurt in her daughter.
Miriam also has an older, non-binary child, Nancy (Alby Baldwin) with her first husband Karl (Martin Marquez). She and Karl used to get drunk all the time but he then got sober and became a vicar. This attempt to shoehorn faith and spirituality into the dialogue is one of several moments when subtlety deserts Payne. But learning of Miriam’s sobriety puts a different spin on her attempts to enforce normalcy by repeatedly offering everyone drinks and snacks (“Dime bar…? Wagon Wheel?”). And her habit of counting the days.
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.
The monologue by Mags’s buffoonish older boyfriend Benjamin (Harry Kershaw) about declining puffin populations too obviously jars with the family’s underlying pain. David’s new partner Lorraine (Lucy Thackeray) seems to have wandered in from a sitcom, possibly Birds of a Feather.
These two characters, and those of a detective and two comically gauche members of the Society for Psychical Research, are underdeveloped. Their functionality is emphasised by the fact that all the players sit in a literal waiting room behind Bunny Christie’s stark living room set until it’s their turn to come on and do their bit. I couldn’t help noticing, too, that both Miriam’s exes have professional backstories while she is defined by fury, loss and dependency.
This remains a tour de force from Walker with strong, subtle support from Higgins, Marquez, Hyland and Baldwin. Payne’s determination to leave Oscar’s disappearance unresolved, observing the way it works and worms its way through the family over time, is a bold one. But it also gives this play a relentlessness that manufactured moments of comedy or awkwardness don’t fully defray.
To 29 Nov, royalcourttheatre.com.
