Review: Lost Atoms at the Liverpool Playhouse ****

When a trio of Swansea university students formed a theatre company there in the mid-90s, little could they have imagined that they themselves would one day be studied in turn.

But 30 years on, Frantic Assembly is on not one but several curricula, as the huge number of young people in the audience at the Liverpool Playhouse on opening night revealed.

The company has a long association with Liverpool. One of its earliest successes was Wirral playwright Michael Wynne’s Sell Out, while in 2001 the Unity co-commissioned its drama Underworld.

In more recent years it’s made the Everyman and Playhouse its touring home, presenting a succession of dreamy, off-kilter, kinetic shows which push physical storytelling boundaries.

Lost Atoms, playwright Anna Jordan’s wry and sweary two-hander about a couple falling in and out of love, sees the pair in question - Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) and Robbie (Joe Layton) - recounting the rise and fall of their relationship from different and, as it turns out, differing viewpoints so that the line between what is truth, what is mis-remembered and what is simply personal perspective becomes increasingly blurred.

We first meet the pair post-relationship as they retell their story, from a coffee shop/railway station ‘meet cute’ (which stretches credibility somewhat), to their burgeoning love affair, the giddy heights of happiness and then the fissures which develop and lead to a its ultimate implosion.

Jess is, outwardly at least, a glass half-full, sociable livewire who is determined to burn brightly, while Robbie is quiet, cautious, cynical and a homebody. These diametric opposites evidently attract although it’s not always clear how and why.

Above: Lost Atoms. Top: Robbie (Joe Layton) and Jess (Hannah Sinclair Robinson). Photos by Tristram Kenton.

The plot - told in a series of flashbacks ahead of the interval and in a more linear fashion after it - is layered over the physical connection between the two, played out in classic Frantic fashion in front of, across and over Andrzej Goulding’s visually striking and endlessly adaptable set.

Imagine an old bank vault-come-climbing wall, where each drawer holds a precious (or not so precious) memory, but which then also becomes a physical step for Robinson and Layton who clamber, stretch, rotate, entwine or perch.

As their world is turned increasingly upside down, so do they, until who knows which way is the right way of seeing things.

Both Robinson and Layton have become regular collaborators with Frantic Assembly, appearing in the company’s most recent shows at the Playhouse – Othello and Metamorphosis. Layton also performed in The Unreturning at the Everyman in 2018. And long before that, as a young aspiring actor he was part of Frantic Assembly’s Ignition programme.

Here, together with Frantic's artistic director Scott Graham, they create an engaging, sinuous and at times fearless piece of storytelling in which, despite its physical sense of the surreal, the audience can identify.

At the heart of Lost Atoms is an ordinary story (unremarkable boy and girl meet, get together, break up), but one told in an extraordinary way which lifts it from the mundane to something all together more nuanced and meaningful.