Writer: Anna Jordan
Director: Scott Graham
A love story told as memory flashbacks between a couple who never really explain why they are given the chance to roam around their relationship, the Lyric Hammersmith welcomes Frantic Assembly’s tour of Anna Jordan’s new play Lost Atoms, which premiered in Leicester a few months ago. It takes an innovative physical theatre approach to staging, but never quite finds sufficient chemistry between the leads to sustain its overlong running time. Told in chronological order, it touches on a lot of romantic challenges – meeting the parents, disconnected lifestyles and the harder reality of personal tragedy – but skirting through too many chapters, Jordan’s atoms just drift further apart.
With a meet-cute in the coffee shop where Jess works, the anxious Robbie abandons their instant connection before it gets started. But fate brings them together once more and into a relationship that consumes them. Years on, the pair are reunited once more in a room that contains all of their memories, but it’s not long before the bad starts to outweigh the good.
Lost Atoms has a strong, if predictable structure, creating plenty of opportunities to wrong-foot the audience as the older, maybe wiser versions of Jess and Robbie comment on the people they were and the mistakes they made. But more interesting structural choices could have created a stronger dynamic including shaking up the order to offer perhaps more jeopardy with the audience forced to do the work to piece some of the story together, or even to replay scenes from different points of view to try see Jess and Rob’s perspective on their time together and the moments when they think it went wrong, although they do discuss and disagree on some of those memories in the ‘present.’
The conventional trajectory of their relationship is, perhaps, the point, and Lost Atoms finds plenty of comedy in the slightly dorky boy meeting the cool girl as she complains about his clothes and he dislikes her friends. Act Two is given over to a bigger personal trial, a real grown-up event that pushes both of them to a new extreme, yet the emotional impact doesn’t land in Director Scott Graham’s production, especially with Luke Norris’ devastating Guess How Much I Love You? at the Royal Court treading similar ground much more successfully.
Characterisation is enjoyable with Hannah Sinclair Robinson finding lots of interesting edges to Jess, a wannabe artist who cannot commit to herself, while Joe Layton’s Robbie is gentler and, to Jess’ frustration, more homely. The use of choreography helps to build a bigger sense of their life together, and Graham has the actors stretch and climb the floor-to-ceiling drawers of Andrzej Goulding’s cupboard set as scenes flow nicely together. Yet for all the work to establish Jess and Robbie as a couple, they don’t quite convince, not finding enough chemistry to explain why they stay together for so long when they seem so different.
Lost Atoms starts to say some interesting things about the dark reality behind fairytales, the nature of memory and the complexity of a life together, especially when it starts to come apart, but running at close to 2 hours and 40 minutes (in excess of the advertised running time), the show leaves all of these strands unresolved. We never really learn why they have been given this chance to revisit this particular connection or why the memory of it keeps pulling them back.
Runs until 28 February 2026
