Lost Atoms - Frantic Assembly Review

★★★☆☆

Frantic Assembly celebrates its 30th anniversary with Lost Atoms, a brand-new play written by award-winning playwright Anna Jordan. Known for their bold physical theatre and emotionally charged storytelling, Frantic Assembly has built a reputation as one of the UK’s most innovative theatre companies. But does Lost Atoms live up to the company’s acclaimed legacy, or does the story get lost behind the production's spectacle?

Joe Layton and Hannah Sinclair Robinson - Photo Credit Tristram Kenton

Lost Atoms is a bittersweet exploration of love, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves. The play follows Jess and Robbie through the dizzying highs and painful lows of their relationship, exploring how two people can share the same past but remember it differently. What starts as a chance meeting in a coffee shop develops into a disastrous mini-golf date, transforming into a love story, only for it to fade away after a shared moment of grief for the pair. Directed by Scott Graham, this piece explores themes such as grief, loss, identity, and the reliability of memories. This is a very humanistic story, which centres around the futility of memory; it is funny, it is devastating, it is interesting… 

The biggest victory of Lost Atoms lies not in grand spectacle, but in the ingenious simplicity of Andrzej Goulding’s set design and the extraordinary physicality that Frantic Assembly are rightly celebrated for. At first glance, the stage appears to offer only a wall of drawers and two chairs. But in practice, it becomes a living, breathing organism. Drawers unfold into lights, beds, stairs, and tables; props appear and vanish as if conjured from memory itself. It’s a design of quiet brilliance, serving not only the story but the actors’, whose movements are as fluid and precise as dance. Every gesture, every drawer opened or step taken feels intentional and precisely choreographed. This is physical storytelling at its most eloquent: You could watch in silence and still understand the narrative. Scene transitions, in particular, were exciting, as actors climbed across the set, pulled out costumes, and exchanged books or cups of coffee.

What lifts this production further is the complementary use of sound and light. Carolyn Downing’s sound design and Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting work with the narrative, sharpening its edge. Stark, cold white light cut through the stage whenever a memory faltered or was contested, sometimes creeping in like a fading recollection, sometimes snapping abruptly to reveal disagreement in the memory. It’s a simple but effective device, ensuring that the audience understands the play's connection to memory. Meanwhile, the soundscape drifts between naturalism and abstraction: the hum of everyday life one moment, a pounding heartbeat the next, pulling us in and out of the characters’ world. Together, these elements turn the stage into a canvas of memory. 

Where Lost Atoms falters is in its core story. Act One sets up a fascinating study of two characters from vastly different worlds: Jess, the rebellious child of high-achieving parents with successful siblings, and Robbie, the introverted young man still shadowed by his mother’s death and a fractured relationship with his father. The friction between their backgrounds promised a collision of worlds that felt both inevitable and exciting. At the interval, I found myself anticipating a dramatic convergence that would pay off this groundwork.

Hannah Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton - Photo Credit Tristram Kenton

But Act Two takes a different path. And, for me, a less satisfying one. Instead of weaving the threads together, the narrative pushes them further apart, leaning into heartbreak and loss in a way that, while brutally honest and real, felt like a missed opportunity. Life, of course, often plays out in fragments: people drift, connections fracture, grief overshadows joy. Yet on stage, this representation of everyday unpredictability came across less as deliberate truth-telling and more as a story that lost sight of its own best ideas.

The greatest disappointment is how the motif of memory, established so powerfully in Act One, evaporates in the second half. The audience is primed to expect that memory will become a key to the story’s resolution: why are these two characters being made to look back? What is to be learned from revisiting the past? Yet instead, the play veers into speculative conversations about potential futures, leaving the memory device feeling like a discarded concept. Without a payoff, much of what was so effective earlier on feels undermined, almost irrelevant. It’s a conclusion that arrives from nowhere, leaving the loose threads of Act One dangling.

I should acknowledge that my own perspective may have shaped this response. As someone who has not personally experienced some of the issues the play addresses, I may not have fully connected with the emotional resonance that others in the audience clearly felt. For those whose lives echo the themes onstage, the rawness of Act Two might well have outweighed the blurred storytelling. However, for me, despite moments of brilliance, Lost Atoms ultimately ended with a sense of a story that promised more than it ultimately delivered.

With just two actors carrying the entire weight of Lost Atoms, it was essential that both were not only believable but magnetic, and they delivered in abundance. Joe Layton’s Robbie was a portrait of quiet charm; his awkwardness and boyish innocence drew the audience to him almost immediately. There was something irresistibly recognisable about his hunched shoulders, hesitant smile, and careful delivery, a character we have all known in real life. As Robbie’s vulnerabilities came to the surface —his grief, his fractured relationships, his desperate desire to connect —Layton shaded the character with raw honesty. What began as a shy, introverted figure grew into a fully dimensional human being, and Layton’s understated sincerity made his journey all the more moving.

By contrast, Hannah Sinclair Robinson blazed onto the stage as Jess with wit, confidence, and an infectious brassiness that had the audience laughing along from her first lines. She embodied the rebel with a cause, an extrovert masking her own insecurities, and Robinson played those dual layers. There was fire in her sarcasm, but also flashes of vulnerability that hinted at what lay beneath the bravado. Over the course of the play, she steered Jess towards maturity and resilience without ever losing that spark that made her so compelling to watch. The result was a character the audience could root for wholeheartedly, even when the narrative itself wandered.

Together, Layton and Robinson were electric. The shifts in their energy as they moved from first meeting to fragile intimacy, from blossoming romance to heartbreak, were rich with detail. Their performances were physically agile, emotionally demanding, and utterly captivating. In lesser hands, Lost Atoms might have struggled to sustain momentum, but with these two performers at the centre, the production always had a beating heart.

Frantic Assembly has built its reputation on crafting theatre that speaks as much through movement, light, and sound as it does through words, and Lost Atoms is no exception. The story may divide audiences, but that is part of the beauty of live theatre. One thing is certain: Lost Atoms is performed with craft and anchored by two exceptional actors. Whether you’re a longtime fan of Frantic Assembly or a newcomer to their world of physical storytelling, this anniversary production is an inventive piece that deserves to be seen. Lost Atoms runs until 28 February 2026,