Frantic Assembly’s Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan and directed by Scott Graham, is a tender and quietly devastating exploration of how we love and how we remember. What appears, at first glance, to be a post break up two hander about Jess and Robbie soon reveals itself as something far more slippery, a study of memory as an unreliable narrator rather than a straightforward anatomy of a relationship.
Jordan’s script invites the couple to relive their story in fragments, stepping in and out of the present day to comment on what they recall. These moments of foreshadowing are woven throughout the piece, allowing the audience to feel the emotional inevitability long before the characters reach their end point.
The pair occupy many of the same memories, debating details in the shared space rather than offering separate perspectives. It is an intriguing choice, although there are times when the play opts to tell us how a memory diverges instead of dramatising the difference. Even so, the distortions feel purposeful, a manifestation of the self protective instinct that colours so many recollections of love gone wrong.
Andrzej Goulding’s set provides much of the production’s thematic backbone. A towering wall of archive drawers, from which memories seem to be physically extracted, becomes a visual metaphor for the impossibility of accurate recall. It also functions as a vertical playground, allowing the performers to climb and descend as if traversing the shifting terrain of the past. The scale of the design captures both the claustrophobia of a faltering relationship and the vast, disordered expanse of stored memory.
Movement, as expected from Frantic Assembly, plays an essential role. It communicates what words cannot, such as the electric charge of first physical contact or the paralysing weight of grief. The movement sequences are beautifully executed and consistently complementary to the text, although the production never fully recreates the dizzy exhilaration of falling in love that it so ambitiously seeks to evoke.
Joe Layton and Hannah Sinclair Robinson, both deeply embedded in the research and development process, deliver compelling performances. There are moments when the romantic chemistry falters and the emotional investment feels more directed towards the material than each other. Yet individually they inhabit their characters with nuance and clarity, navigating the gendered power dynamics and shifting emotional temperatures with care.
Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting design subtly charts time shifts and mood changes, using shadows and isolation to highlight emotional distance. Carolyn Downing’s sound design expands the world beyond the couple, adding texture as both sonic memory trigger and emotional signpost.
Despite the weight of its themes, Lost Atoms finds genuine humour. Its comedy softens the intensity without undermining its sincerity, making the quieter heartbreaks all the more affecting when they finally arrive.
Frantic Assembly’s latest work might be less about love itself and more about the impossibility of remembering love truthfully, but in that distinction lies its power. Thoughtful, inventive and quietly shattering, Lost Atom’s most striking achievement is its insistence that love is shaped not only by what happened, but by what we choose to remember.
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