Review: THE URMETAZOAN, Hampstead Theatre

In a rental in Florida, Abigail is helping Alice to pack: the Nobel Prize winner and decorated scientist is leaving Earth to further space research. The two sisters haven’t spoken in seven years. Alex Rugman delivers a tender representation of sisterhood. Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Meghan Treadway are gently impressive, slowly pulling back the layers of sororal loyalty to reveal a quiet reflection on resentment and inadequacy. Anna Ledwich directs an unhurried production that tends to its humour as much as it cherishes its emotional side. 

Rugman’s dialogues are sparse and impressionist. His conversations are naturalistic: past events are hinted at without any detailed descriptions that define Abigail and Alice’s pain, and their shared history unfolds with the familiarity of two people who don’t need to over-explain themselves for the benefit of an invisible audience. He trusts his viewers to engage with his characters emotionally, relying on them to fill in the gaps autonomously.

The chasm between the women materialises in long, spacious silences that extend between them. The pair are rarely uncomfortable during these pauses, but it would be a stretch to suggest that they relax into them. Distance weighs heavily on their relationship, and Ledwich lets it linger and fester in Myer-Bennett and Treadway’s performances. Circumstantial banter and relentless sisterly teasing create a sweetly mundane push-and-pull dynamic: they both know how to test each other’s limits and what to say to hurt the other.

There’s almost a bitterness, an inability to connect that binds the duo. Yet, their blood keeps them together, making them exquisitely complex beings. Alice’s sentimentality and eldest daughter mentality appears laterally in her tiptoeing around Abigail’s failures, but also in her targeted hits at her sister’s confidence. In turn, Abigail knows how to chip at Alice’s aplomb. Neither is especially emotive, so each brief, haunted look and betrayal of insecurity shapes them. Myer-Bennett and Treadway successfully portray the tragedy of not knowing someone anymore.

Ben Allen completes the cast as Will, Alice’s ex-boyfriend. His role is a vehicle for added friction, forgettable and mostly irrelevant to the more profound epiphanies that happen within the sisters, but crucial to their personal conflict. Lighting designer Jonathan Chan’s contribution makes the show vividly real, with choices that enhance the visuals by adding contextual elements (the car beams reflecting the shadows of the blinds; the polar opposition between the hues of the cold kitchen neon and the warm bedroom light; the intensity of a difficult conversation playing out in semi-darkness…). 

Rugman’s subtext floats to the surface as Ledwich drives all the space talk into an echo on the human condition. The hypothetical last common ancestor of all animals (the titular Urmetazoan) becomes the foundation of a play about family, doubt, and existential fear. Ambition and purpose come into the picture as buffers to achieve that “something more” that’s drilled into us as children, and which, in adulthood, often leads us to neglect or ignore what we already have. Alice and Abigail’s final, intense, direct display of devotion in the face of rivalry, envy, and inferiority is simply harrowing. The Urmetazoan is a small story of cosmic value.

The Urmetazoan runs at Hampstead Theatre until 24 October

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