Nick Payne is an exemplar of this theatre’s mission to nurture new writers. It was here he started out, on the young writers’ programme. Now a starry alumnus, he completes a career full circle by premiering a play on its main stage for the first time. Is it a triumphant return? Not exactly, although he has gathered a garlanded company around him, including director Marianne Elliott, another Royal Court returnee.
Nicola Walker plays Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her son, Oscar, who vanished when he was not yet 16. The play’s indirect inquiries into loss (When does disappearance turn into permanent loss? Is moving on the same as giving up?) feel very much in keeping with Payne’s oeuvre on stage and screen. So does its cut-up structure that shuttles non-chronologically through time, not unlike his 2012 play Constellations. Scenes flip from the hopeful beginnings of a police investigation to false leads followed ever more desperately by Miriam, to seven years later when her ex-husband David (Paul Higgins) suggests a memorial as some form of closure.
Among the flashbacks are a blended family’s fractiousness and mother-child bust-ups between Miriam and Nancy (Alby Baldwin), who is so haunted by their brother’s death that they dabble in spiritualism, and Miriam and Margaret (Ella Lily Hyland), who has moved on with her older boyfriend, Benjamin (Harry Kershaw).
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.
When David’s new partner, Lorraine (Lucy Thackeray, fantastic), makes an appearance at a family get-together, the drama seems transformed into social satire with shades of Abigail’s Party. Lorraine’s social uncouthness is softly parodied; so is Benjamin’s loftiness as he gives an extended lecture on the life of puffins. It is amusing in itself, but what is it doing in this play, exactly?
Actors seem stranded too, trying to hold up characters that do not always feel real; Miriam’s first husband, Karl (Martin Marquez), now a vicar, seems to exist purely to answer questions around faith, as well as delivering a few strangely comic lines about sex for men of the cloth.
Dramatically, it is static, both downstage and at the back of Bunny Christie’s set, which is separated by glass and turned into an existential waiting room for off-stage characters who sit with their head in their hands or in melancholy reflection. It’s a good idea, but the symbolism outweighs its effect.
You learn next to nothing about who these people are, from where they live to what Miriam and David do for a living. There are few spoken memories of Oscar. Walker projects desperation that threatens to tip over into full-scale meltdown. Higgins has a lesser role but gives a sure performance of nervous inadequacy and anger, both directed at Miriam. Yet, as a whole, the emotional range of performances seems limited, maybe hemmed in by the jumping structure.
This is unquestionably dramatic subject matter with resonances to so many news stories on disappeared children, but it just does not cut deeply enough.
