Lost Atoms | Belgrade Theatre

Lost Atoms, which is written by Anna Jordan and directed by Scott Graham, is commissioned and produced by Frantic Assembly in collaboration with Leicester Curve, Mayflower Southampton and Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.

With the news heavy with dread and the nights growing darker, we could all use a little light to brighten our days. Centring on love, Jordan’s play explores how people perceive romantic relationships and how those perceptions shape their experiences. This marks Jordan’s second collaboration with Frantic Assembly, following The Unreturning.

She was drawn to the company’s ability not just to tell a story, but to create a feeling on stage. Frantic Assembly possess a rare gift for expressing the inexpressible through movement, and love, that most abstract of emotions, is the perfect subject for them. How do you stage the energy of falling in love? How do you make that feeling recognisable for an audience? And perhaps more intriguingly, how do we recall these moments through memory, how are they stored, reshaped and re-felt?

Inspired by Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, which also influenced Lovesong (2011), Graham was interested in exploring perspective. He reflected on how memories of relationships are inherently unreliable, constantly shifting each time we revisit them. How truthful can they ever be?

In Lost Atoms, this is embodied through Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) and Robbie (Joe Layton), whose recollections of their relationship move between euphoric highs and crushing lows. When the characters begin to doubt their own memories, the play glitches: Carolyn Downing’s echoing sound design and Simisola Majekodunmi’s shadowy lighting plunge us into a liminal space. Jess and Robbie challenge what we’ve just seen – “It wasn’t like that,” “You never said that,” – before being thrown back onto the emotional roller-coaster. Scenes restart with subtle changes or devolve into debate, leaving the audience uncertain of what the truth really is.

Graham has said that from the outset he wanted Layton and Sinclair Robinson involved, having both previously performed with Frantic in Othello and Metamorphosis. Their collaboration in developing the piece is evident: Sinclair Robinson’s Jess, a free-spirited, chaotic artist and self-described ‘Queen of Chaos’ contrasts sharply with Layton’s Robbie, a cautious man who works in a training canteen and prefers quiet nights in. Together, they fluidly shift between past and present, navigating complex emotional changes with ease. As expected from Frantic Assembly, movement is integral, and both performers move around the space with precision and energy.

Andrzej Goulding’s ingenious set design mirrors the play’s exploration of memory: a vast wall of drawers holding props, costumes and fragments of the past. The performers climb and balance on these drawers, sometimes even the handles, as they shift and transform. Drawers light up or extend to become steps, seats or even a bed or cliff edge. Alongside two adaptable chairs, the set becomes a living, breathing part of the storytelling, enabling seamless transitions.

Overall, Anna Jordan has written a modern romance that resists fairy-tale tropes and instead focuses on the essence of feeling itself. Lost Atoms reminds us that truth may be subjective, but to love and to be loved is a privilege worth remembering.

Lost Atoms plays at the Belgrade Theatre until Saturday 25th October 2025.

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★★★★☆ (4*)

Gifted tickets in return for an honest review | Photography by Tristram Kentom