Lost Atoms

 Curve, Leicester

29^th September, 2025

“It feels like we’re suspended in time”

Frantic Assembly’s co-productions with Curve are unmissable. In recent years, they’ve transformed literary classics such as Othello and Metamorphosis, fusing movement and design to drive the story forward, stripping the text and creating startling theatre for contemporary audiences. Frantic’s co-founder and artistic director Scott Graham directs this new play by Anna Jordan, about a young couple plunging into their shared past, scaling the soaring highs and crushing lows of their relationship. Those who saw Jordan’s The Unreturning will know that her plays and Frantic Assembly are a happy pairing. That play delved into perceptions of home and national identity in a production which probed big questions with astonishing physicality. Lost Atoms, which celebrates the company’s 30th anniversary, blends their hallmark physicality and stunning design with Jordan’s more personal story of a couple re-living their relationship.

Andrzej Goulding’s design, an impressive wall of drawers, takes inspiration from the opening stage direction in the text: it ‘should hold memories. The stuff of a relationship’. It’s on these drawers, stacked as high as 14 rows tall, that the couple precariously but skilfully climb and clamber, opening up drawers and fetching memories from their past: donuts from their first encounter, golf clubs from an early date, family photos. They’re the props of everyday life, the detritus of a relationship; all neatly organised, easily retrieved and easily filed away. It provides a canvas where we meet Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) and Robbie (Joe Layton) as they dissect their relationship. We’re submersed into memories from throughout their relationship like the initial meet-cute, awkward first meetings with the in-laws, the highs of falling in love and the nadirs of trauma. It’s easy to invest in the couple, a result achieved thanks to Jordan’s use of language. The dialogue is prosaic, specific and sounds believable in the mouths of a young couple. But their likability is also thanks to Robinson and Layton’s performances. Layton brings out Joe’s quiet vulnerability and pragmatism. When he wins £500 on a scratch card, there are no flights of fancy or major celebration; he seems resigned to the fact he’s likely never going to be able to buy a property. His job teaching disadvantaged youths how to cook is telling of how he’s not without ambition but also shuns any compliments that what he’s doing may be heroic. And yet he’s strongly encouraging of Jess’ squashed ambitions to become a painter. Jess, on the other hand, can be less disciplined and more spontaneous. How the two actors capture their characters’ contradictions, idiosyncrasies and faults is what makes the play so enthralling.

Graham enhances the characters’ relationship through movement. As they literally scale their memories, at times it looks like the pair are suspended in mid-air as they navigate up and across the wall with only small drawer handles as footholds, and under and over each other like acrobats. Graham and his design team make great use of this effect to stage certain memories. A walk along a stormy coastal path to show Jess his mum’s beach hut sets off Robbie’s grief and an admission that he might be depressed. At this point, he is perched on a single draw high on the stage immersed in the memory of being close to the cliff edge (sound design is by Carolyn Downing; lighting by Simisola Majekodunmi). There are funnier moments too, such as one exchange where the couple remember Jess’ parents meeting Robbie for the first time. Being grilled on career prospects, whether he’s a veggie and how much sugar he takes in his tea is choreographed in a way which gives it pace, lightness and humour.

But what is another sign of Graham’s assuredness in Jordan’s play is where he lets the text come to the fore, unaccompanied by any movement. In the second act, after deciding to not go ahead with a termination, Jess suffers a miscarriage. Again, the specificity in Jordan’s text makes the scenes painfully tangible: their memories of being put in a freezing cold holding room, the nurse who couldn’t make eye contact, the sterility of phrases like ‘medical management’. For those familiar with the situation, it strikes a chord. But I suppose that is like so much of Lost Atoms, everyone who has been in a relationship will recognise at least some of the beats in Jess and Robbie’s experience.

As their relationship falters so does the way they remember those hard times. The characters often comment on the previous scene in a space which the text refers to as No Man’s Land. Slight lighting changes reflect this change of perspective as Jess and Robbie disagree on what was said, where they were, and whether one felt supported by the other. In this way, Jess’ interest in the oral tradition of how fairy tales have morphed over the centuries reflects Jordan’s thematic interest in the fallibility of memory. As their memories diverge and it’s questioned what is remembered versus what is chosen to be forgotten, the fractures in their relationship become more visible. The play ends in a series of hypothetical speeches as to where their lives (might) take them, together or apart. It’s a beautiful piece of writing which melds the specific and the universal in a production which perfectly fuses text, movement and design.

Lost Atoms plays at Curve until 4^th October before touring. For more information, please visit https://www.curveonline.co.uk/whats-on/shows/lost-atoms/

Lost Atoms plays at Lyric Hammersmith Theatre 29^th January – 28^th February 2026.

Joe Layton (Robbie) & Hannah Sinclair Robinson (Jess) in Lost Atoms. Photo Credit Tristram Kenton