The Urmetazoan, Hampstead Theatre
Thursday 24th September 2026
Tonight there’s almost a full moon, and the sky is clear so this waxing gibbous orb inevitably makes me think of space, the planets and the universe. Well, a bit anyway. So I should be responsive to Alex Rugman’s debut play, The Urmetazoan, which is about space travel and saying farewell to Earth. Staged in the Hampstead Theatre’s studio space, it’s basically a 100-minute two-hander about two sisters who are about to part for ever. As I said, I should like it; it’s kooky enough; but actually I don’t. And here’s why.
The set up is simple: 40-year-old Alice and her estranged younger sister Abigail are meeting for the first time in seven years in a sparsely furnished bungalow in Florida. Alice is a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist and part of an imminent interplanetary mission to Mars, where the astronauts will stay and create a new socity. By contrast, Abigail is a bit of a under-achiever, a casual stoner who hasn’t found her calling in life. They’ve drifted apart, but now they meet some two weeks before Alice is due to blast off, and so they are in effect saying goodbye for ever. As one of them realises, it’s a bit like dying, isn’t it? A final farewell.
Near the start of the play, Alice explains how mindbogglingly massive the universe is (a whole string of billions); how we live in a tiny corner of it (a pinhead); how we are entirely alone because despite the fact that “we’ve been sending messages into the sky for more than a hundred years now”, we’ve heard “nothing back”, a restatement — as the programme note explains — of physicist Enrico Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?” Posed in 1950, it was meant to draw attention to the age and scale of the universe, and to suggest that surely somewhere, somehow, something might have created life and high-tech on another planet. Yet we’ve never heard from them, or should that be “it”?
Alice builds on this by arguing that the reason for this cosmic silence is that every civilization necessarily runs into an extinction event, which limits its ability to communicate with the rest of the universe. On our Earth, we know the way things are going: “climate change, nuclear war, AI explosion — take your pick.” The solution, for her, is to leave the planet and colonise Mars. As the sisters argue about whether this is a hopeful solution to our ills, or just a way of spreading humanity’s self-destructive urges across our solar system, other ideas crop up, from the struggles to live on land of our distant fish ancestors to a cure for malaria. This kind of stuff is quite common in science plays, but oddly enough here it doesn’t really have the emotional punch that maybe it deserves. And it’s not the only thing I dislike about the play.
The first problem is the title, which means the hypothetical last common ancestor of all animals (Metazoa), but I can’t pronounce it and I needed to google this so that’s not good is it? The second is the introduction of Will, Alice’s younger ex, whose arrival adds little to the story, except for a couple of predictable sex scenes, and who is comparatively underwritten. So while some episodes of awkward and then kooky sisterly rapport ring true occasionally, and there’s a brilliant moment when they both lose themselves in a gloriously loud Led Zeppelin song, somehow I never really believe in their relationship.
I can understand that an astronaut who plans to leave Earth for ever might have doubts about doing so, but I’m not convinced by Alice’s hesitations. They seem out of character in a story which is very much based on character: Alice the strong, organized, rational one; Abigail the weaker, messier, sillier one. One an intellectual paragon; the other a dropout. So the writing is an uneasy mix of family drama, although I’d like to know more about their parents, and scientific ideas, which don’t quite become dramatic enough. Even the final intensification of the sisters’ conflict doesn’t feel as gut-wrenching as it should.
Nor is the weakness of the drama completely overcome by Anna Ledwich’s production, which has a rather unfocused vibe, with awkward scene changes, and episodes when the stage is empty. The set, designed by Tomás Palmer, is a suitably sterile sofa-centred temporary abode, with packing boxes symbolising the transient nature of the space. The cast — Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Meghan Treadway and Ben Allen (Will) — do good work, with Myer-Bennett’s seriously hard-nosed older sister a good contrast to Treadway’s younger and more volatile Abigail. Yet the evening is underwhelming, lacking in urgency. And distinctly earthbound as it fails to take off.
This review first appeared on The Arts Desk
- The Urmetazoan is at the Hampstead Theatre until 24 October.
