I visited the Hampstead Theatre for the first time this week to see Alex Rugman’s debut play, The Urmetazoan. Referencing a last hypothetical common ancestor of all animals, the play follows the reconnection of two sisters, Abigail (Meghan Treadway) and Alice (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) as the latter is preparing to leave earth forever. While Rugman’s central premise is an interesting one, the narrative’s shifting focus and repetition mean that it never decides what it wants to be, hampering its dramatic impact.
The key player here is Myer-Bennett, who thoughtfully conveys Alice’s passion, and apprehension at her upcoming mission. Out of the three characters, hers is the most developed, and although her scientific lectures may lose some of the audience, I was totally convinced that Alice had a Nobel and was ready to fly into space. Abigail is only afforded the same development much later in the play, as at first her sole role is to provide light comic relief and challenge her sister. Considering the show is built solely on the two’s relationship, both actresses do well to keep the show moving. However, while individually the characters feel fully formed, their relationship does not. Although we are told there is warmth, the opening audio is the two sisters giggling away as children, we are not really shown it on stage – it seems more that the two sisters barely know anything about each other’s lives. It is established that they did not speak for seven years, but no explicit reason is given to explain this. There isn’t really much warmth, or fun, bar one scene where they blast rock music and dance, and I personally found it quite hard to warm to either of them. Their playing of Connect 4 feels more like boredom, something to do to pass the time more than ‘super fun time with sibling.’ This undercuts Abigail’s later devastation at the loss of Alice, and although both actresses do pull off this goodbye, the underwritten nature of their connection doesn’t make the scene the tearjerker that it could be.
Although Tomás Palmer’s set appears simple on the surface, a fairly muted living room, Jonathan Chan’s lighting adds a worldly depth, communicating changes in the time of day, and, in a good example of stagecraft adopting a crisp white light, transforming Alice’s bungalow seamlessly into a space shuttle at the end. Illuminations from the back of the stage do a lot of theatrical work. Sarah Spencer’s sound design, paired with the increasingly intense orange light does make you do feel like you are in the presence of a rocket launch.
The play is at its most interesting when it interrogates the sisters’ relationship and the central premise, and to sharpen that impact, some scenes and dialogue could do with some shaving. The constant repetition of ‘what’ and ‘weird’ particularly in the opening scenes, doesn’t ring true of normal conversation and hamper the pace, draining the tension like a vacuum in space, an aforementioned game of Connect 4 being an example.
These words should be used elsewhere to deepen some of the other ideas, like the sisters’ clear trauma at being orphaned. For something that seems to be very important, this only pops up sporadically. Instead of spending more time on this, a plot point which could add a layer to the sisters’ relationship, plenty of time is given to Abigail’s cliché soap opera tryst with Alice’s beau Will (Ben Allen), something that has no impact on the plot, with Alice explicitly stating that she is not going to space because of it. It feels like Rugman is trying to find some dramatic tension here – Alice’s deceit, that she cannot change her mind and halt the mission, would have been a better bet, but again, it is not given much time.
Is this an ecological drama? A space drama? A soap opera? A moving family saga of sisterhood? An exploration of neo-colonialism? The show dedicates a bit of time to them all, never quite settling, so although the final scene is poignant enough, it is an uneven road getting there.
3/5
Thanks for reading!
Playing at Hampstead Theatre until October 24th.
Tickets here: https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2026/the-urmetazoan/
Photos by Rich Lakos
