Lost Atoms

'Lost Atoms’, the latest production from physical theatre company ‘Frantic Assembly’, is an intensive two hander, with memorable performances and striking, highly physical staging.

The play, now being staged at the Bristol Old Vic, focuses on the love story of Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) and Robbie (Joe Layton), who meet in a coffee shop, and reconnect a few days later by chance at a train station. From there, we drop in on various stages of their relationship together, reliving the first meeting with in-laws, the first holiday, the moment Robbie asks Jess to move in.

It was commissioned and produced by Frantic Assembly in 2025, as their thirtieth-anniversary production, in a co-production with Curve, Mayflower Southampton and Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, and directed by Frantic Assembly's Artistic Director Scott Graham.

Director Scott Graham said: “I have loved working with Anna on this project. There is something utterly truthful about her approach and her work. To say that her characters and dialogue are genuine is not to say that they are mundane; her writing is beautifully poetic and insightful, effortless! Funny and heartbreaking. She has a fierce tenacity and an inspiring rigour to her process that simultaneously thrills you and makes you feel you are in safe hands!"

Anna Jordan's other plays include Yen, which won the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, Pop Music for Paines Plough, and The Unreturning for Frantic Assembly, which toured to critical acclaim in 2018. Her writing for television includes Succession, Killing Eve and One Day.

Her play sees Jess and Robbie meet, fall in love, navigate the tensions, break up, and come together to recollect. They reflect on the journey and gently bicker over the details and inaccuracies of their recollections, all the while reminding us of the complexities faced by two people willing a connection to work and finding it slipping away.

In remarkable performances, Hannah Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton are both able to evoke what their characters were like as children. They also convincingly convey how partners present us with the potential to be fuller, perhaps better versions of ourselves. Layton’s Robbie is all old wounds, vulnerability, and hope while Robinson’s Jess is full of rebellious fire and quick wit.

They’re a great pairing, providing convincing connection in early flirtations and succeeding in pulling at our heartstrings as they spiral towards an inevitable end.

Jordan has written a very modern romance memory play, perhaps reflecting an age in which memories are methodically filtered and curated. Throughout, it explores the way we purposefully embellish or remould our personal histories, but also how they morph almost on their own with the passing of time.

Andrzej Goulding’s stunning set design and Scott Graham’s impressive direction really delivers making the production both stimulating and visually rich, as Jess and Robbie look back at the days and nights that define them as a pair.

Throughout, they are surrounded by stacks of filing cabinets. Each drawer holds a different memory – items, photos, sometimes flashes of light or sound. The actors use the drawers as ladders, to reach memories that are higher up. They pull the drawers out to become chairs, or stools, or beds – the choreography here is superb, and the physical ability of Robinson and Layton, as they effortlessly haul themselves around is brilliant.

The set provides endless opportunities for it to be interacted with beautifully – as a bed in a hotel room, as a rocky Grimsby beach, as a window, perfect to drunkenly clamber through.

The transitions that take us from memory to memory are seamless and lead us to question the true reality of the story. It is all wonderfully supported by Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting, which fizzes and crackles as memories start to crack.

The production is stylistic and absorbing, cleverly choreographed, and beautifully presented piece of theatre.