Lost Atom's brand new play promises a wild ride through a life-changing relationship - a timeless story which explores how love shapes our lives and how we remember it. Kate Wyver recently caught up with cast members Hannah Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton to find out more... 

“The other leg will follow,” laughs Hannah Sinclair Robinson as she and Joe Layton untangle themselves. The pair are in the early weeks of rehearsals for Lost Atoms, twisting and looping around each other’s bodies. Scott Graham, Frantic Assembly's Artistic Director, watches on, suggesting gentle tweaks as the pair nimbly test different ways to hold each other’s weight and best fit their movements to Anna Jordan’s script. “Sometimes it feels like patting your head and rubbing your stomach,” demonstrates Joe Layton, best known for his murderous turn as Mick Michaelis in Coronation Street, as the team breaks for lunch. “But there’s always a moment when it clicks.”

The two actors revel in Frantic Assembly’s process. They have both performed in multiple Frantic shows before, working together on 2023’s Metamorphosis and 2022’s Othello. “We have a shorthand and a solid friendship,” smiles Sinclair Robinson, who starred in the dazzling farce, The Play That Goes Wrong, in the West End. “We know how to ask for what we need.” This confidence in each other is vital for a two-hander that relies on their strength and connection. “You’re flinging each other around,” Sinclair Robinson says, “so there has to be a lot of trust.”

Trust and relationships are at the core of Lost Atoms, Frantic Assembly’s 30th anniversary production. But this is no happily ever after. “What appealed to me was how a relationship defines a life,” says playwright Jordan, “regardless of how long that relationship lasts for.” By retracing the stepping stones of a relationship, from the giddy early months to the heavier, bumpier experiences they must traverse together, Lost Atoms asks how partnerships transform us. “Why does a relationship have to last forever,” Jordan asks, “for it to be considered successful?”

Graham wanted to explore the full cycle of a relationship after reading Alain de Botton’s ‘Essays In Love’. Jordan shifted the idea from a single narrator to a dual perspective, enabling our couple - Jess and Robbie - to wrestle with how the other looks back on the same relationship. Jordan invites their unreliable memories to shift and slip, so that when they revisit an argument, they can see for the first time their own ugly actions and their partner’s good intentions; when they relive a moment of softness, they are flooded with the complicated thought of what could have been. “I get excited about those moments on stage that feel flawed and messy and broken,” says Graham. “These moments where we can recognise ourselves.”

Layton and Sinclair Robinson both studied Frantic before they worked with them. Layton was introduced to them by an encouraging drama teacher at school, where he remembers the company’s physicality feeling “unattainable.” Sinclair Robinson researched Frantic at university, having been immediately drawn to their unique use of movement. “I remember watching Othello and being like, that’s what I want to do,” she says. For Lost Atoms, the pair have been in the rare position of being involved in the show from the very first workshop. “It has been really special to see it grow from seed to script,” says Layton. Their early involvement in the devising process means both the script and choreography have formed and solidified around them. This has created a particular closeness to their characters. “I see elements of me in Jess,” Sinclair Robinson notes. “I feel entwined with her.”

In rehearsal, Jordan edits the script as they go, with the team collectively deciding whether something is best said aloud or through the actor’s bodies. “So much of a relationship and our history exudes from us through silence and physicality,” explains Graham; years of love and arguments can be communicated in a pointed look, an outstretched hand, a whisper in the night. Frantic’s process allows the team to find the right way to tell every bit of the story. “Where we have a real common language is the desire to create a feeling,” Jordan says, “and how that can be felt tangibly, palpably, by the audience.” Having worked in TV for the last few years, writing on shows including Killing Eve, One Day and Succession, she says this process has held a novel kind of freedom. “It’s like being let loose in a playground,” she grins.

Every day starts with an hour’s workout, nudging the actors closer to the point of making this physically demanding show look dreamily effortless. But the physical efforts aren’t the only aspect of the show’s development that has stretched them. The team’s conversations around the play have naturally sloped into the sharing of their own relationships, as they dive deeper into understanding Jess and Robbie’s lives. “Our development process has been blisteringly honest,” admits Graham. Layton laughs, shaking his head. “The first workshop felt like a group therapy session. I was drained.”

Frantic has been a part of Layton’s life since he was 17, when he took part in the inaugural year of Ignition, the company’s programme for young people with little or no experience in the arts. “It was for a group of people who didn’t know that the arts were for us,” Layton recalls. “The sensitivity and openness was amazing, and continues to inform the way that I work.” Other graduates of the programme include Paapa Essiedu (The Outrun, I May Destroy You) and Karl Queensborough, who played Hamilton in the West End. “It’s no good sitting in a theatre saying, ‘Come to us’,” Graham reasons, “because they don’t feel they have the permission to go through the doors.” 

Since Ignition began in 2008, Graham says, “arts within education have been deliberately attacked.” The talent development programme had to pause last year when funding couldn’t be secured, but a huge fundraising drive has meant it can now begin again. “It’s so important for a society to engage in creativity, to find your voice.” Graham gestures to the theatre around us. “That’s what making a play is.” Frantic Assembly was formed because people opened the door for him and his friends when they initially formed this company three decades ago. Ignition aims to do the same for the next generation.

“I pinch myself that this is what I do,” Graham says sincerely, reflecting on the company’s 30th anniversary before everyone gathers again to continue the rehearsal. “It’s been hard work but it’s been worth it.” The way he describes it sounds very similar to a relationship. “Yeah,” he nods. “I met people who became friends, who I love, and who have changed my world in a way I couldn’t have imagined.” Like every good relationship, the experience has been transformative.

Feature by Kate Wyver

Lost Atoms shows at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre from Tuesday 21 to Saturday 25 October