If you staged it as a radio play, Anna Jordan’s Lost Atoms would be a skilled but conventional story of a relationship, from meet cute through to heavily foreshadowed breakup.
And as a piece of new writing, you do have to judge it as that play. And it’s not bad! Is it plausible that edgy party girl Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) and aggressively square Robbie (Joe Layton) would become a couple? Maybe, or if they wouldn’t in IRL we know what Jordan means by their relationship. They both represent something the other is lacking: for her, he represents solidity, reliability, stability; for him, she’s the passion and vulnerability lacking.
There’s a gripping plausibility to their halting progress and their frequent roadbumps: her flakiness and his uptightness make difficult bedfollows. Neither of them is capable of changing who they are. But they like each other enough to give it a good try, and for a while it works, taking them through marathon sex sessions, meeting each other’s parents, pregnancy, and even a trip to Grimsby. Gravity, though, is always pulling them a certain way, and frequent flash forward scenes indicate from the start that they don’t, as a couple, go the distance.
When I say gravity is pulling them: I mean that more metaphorically than literally. Physically, they actually seem to defy gravity. That’s because Lost Atoms comes from the veteran physical theatre company Frantic Assembly – who celebrate their thirtieth anniversary this year – and company boss Scott Graham’s staging is what makes the play really sing. Jess and Robbie aren’t just sitting around saying their lines: they’re hair-raisingly clambering over Andrzej Goulding’s set, which is basically a gargantuan filing cabinet, the drawers of which pop out to form small platforms that the duo step and climb over precariously. The fact that neither of them falls off at any point is frankly remarkable and down to what I’m going to call ‘pure theatre magic’.
Does the form of the staging follow the function of the writing? I mean I could cobble a theory together that the precarity of their footing reflects the precarity of their relationship. But I’d say that really the staging is just a cool way of pepping up the script, and that’s just great – it’s kind of the point of Frantic Assembly.
It runs out of steam at the end, with a slightly woo-woo finale that feels needlessly silly, bordering on actual cringe. But for the most part, this is Frantic Assembly doing what it does best: pure theatre magic.
