Lost Watches - What happens when grief manifests in a talking sculpture?

Bold and unsettling, Lost Watches mixes dark comedy with emotional vulnerability in a uniquely theatrical style. This gripping, surreal new play featuring the voice of Jason Isaacs (The White Lotus, Harry Potter) written by emerging playwright Lorenzo Allchurch (Bollocks), and directed by award-winning filmmaker and theatre director Alex Helfrecht (The White King, A Winter’s Journey).  

Following his mother’s death and his father’s absence, Allen is left, barely an adult, with a house he cannot pay off and emotional trauma he doesn’t know how to process.  

However, on the weekend before his family home is due to be repossessed, Allen receives a series of unexpected visits that lead him down a dark path of discovery.

A darkly comic meditation on memory, mental health, and mourning, the show will run in Park Theatre’s intimate Park90 space on Weds 30 July – Sat 23 August.

Over one hallucinatory weekend, Allen is visited by ghosts and converses with a sculpted head of Beat Generation author William Burroughs as he confronts the emotional wreckage of a past he can no longer repress.

A genre-defying psychological absurdist drama, Lost Watches blends rich theatrical language with biting wit and gut-punch emotion. As this groundbreaking production gets ready for the London stage, Allchurch and Helfrecht discuss their creative process, the balance between pain and comedy, and the strange comfort of dust and ghosts.  

The character of William Burroughs as a talking sculpture - voiced by White Lotus and Harry Potter's Jason Isaacs - is a unique and curious concept - where did that idea come from?

Lorenzo: I’m a huge Burroughs fan. He’s such a malleable character when adapted – just look at the difference between Cronenberg and Guadagnino’s portrayals of his work and personality. I wanted to write a play that included him, but I also wanted to avoid a kind of period aspect I feared might slip into pretentiousness or irrelevance.  

My way around that and, I think to elevate and make the character more specific to this show, was to present him in sculpture form – almost like a relic of an older era. He is part teacher, part tormentor, part typical London flatmate who doesn’t do the dishes. This clearly isn’t a 1:1 representation of the great man or his life. Rather, it is a young, Gen Z guy’s perception of what he might have been like: revolutionary, rash, witty, but also obnoxious, grouchy, and old.  

I found the idea of the kind of people I might hang out with day-to-day spending their time in a spare room situation with one of the most enigmatic writers of all time ripe for drama and comedy alike. Then, of course, there’s the surreality of him being a (mostly) inanimate object. Just as Allen’s mother breathed first life into the Burroughs sculpture, Jason came along and added so much vivacity. It was an absolute joy working with him and his voice has all the eccentricities and power needed to do Mister Burroughs justice.  

Alex: Originally Lorenzo had conceived Burroughs as one of the projections that appear to the protagonist. There was originally one surreal visitor in each act; when we were developing and workshopping the play we felt that Burroughs deserved a larger presence in the play, and really had a different dramatic function than the projections of family members who appear to him (and are played by the same actor). He sat outside all of that as a commentator, as a contextualiser, as an antagonist and has the comic relief.  

By this logic we felt he should inhabit the space differently, sometimes he could be booming and godlike and at other times he could be a more intimate voice, that could indeed be in Allen’s own head. Lorenzo had the Beat Generation in the forefront of his mind and, felt a great affinity with their poetry which filled his early drafts. Burroughs and Allen make a fun cross-generational odd couple. Burroughs brings humanity, humour and a rebellious spirit to proceedings and who better than Jason Isaacs, who has incredible joie de vivre, chutzpah and never lacks an opinion?  

I find him to be a fearless and brilliant actor, having worked with him couple of times including on my film A Winter’s Dream (currently in post-production) and he is gifted at doing voices. I thought it would bring real magic and gravitas to proceedings working with him, and attract audiences, including Gen Z. Even though he’s not physically on stage, he is very much present!  

The surreal humour in the script cuts through the heaviness of grief - was that balance hard to strike?

Alex: I think Lorenzo has achieved a good balance in the writing, and I ‘m excited to see how it plays. I think the play is very funny and also touching. It’s strange and esoteric but that gives it a sense of wonder and magic which makes it stand out for me. Between the pain and the humour there is mystery and unknown, and I find the moments of ambiguity to be the most thought-provoking and refreshing.  

Lorenzo: Not particularly. I think in life humour always goes hand-in-hand with grief or sadness. Maybe we feel guilty about it but often it’s just a natural human reaction, a way for us to share grief. Plus, you wouldn’t really grieve something you didn’t have at least some positive relationship with.  

The happiness always lies just beneath. Fine-tuning how that is represented dramatically versus how it manifests in life did take some tinkering of course, but I loved the workshopping process. Surprisingly, I think the play has turned out funnier than I originally intended, but I’m not complaining.  

The dust motif recurs throughout the play. What does it represent?

Lorenzo: The dust is literally the by-product of the mother’s sculpting work. Like Burroughs, it is a physical reminder of her that the characters can interact with, remember her through. To a child, however, it also took on a magical quality which has stuck with Allen – something with great creative and imaginative potential. Like stardust, it is the falling remnants of something beautiful.  

And, just as stardust is associated with time and great distance, the dust is also like the falling sand of an hourglass as Allen’s time is running out. Despite it’s beauty, dust is still dust, and it literally hangs over Allen and the shed, showing the clutter and stasis of his life.  

Alex: Ah, the dust. The dust is from the mother’s sculptures but it’s the stuff the phantoms are made of. To me it’s rather Shakespearean. It makes Allen see what he needs to see. It is the stuff of reckoning and the stuff of the afterlife. After all as my 12 year old says, our DNA is essentially made from the dust of stars.  

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"I think there’s a deep longing for connection and freedom in all the characters of the play."

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‍Lost Watches plays with hallucination, memory, and grief - what first gave you the idea for the play?

Lorenzo: A whole host of different questions and wanting to find the answer. Why can’t I remember how I felt a month ago? Why do I create routines I know are bad for me? etc. I’m interested in how relationships can break down. How you grieve the dead but also how you can grieve people changing, including yourself. In a sense, you lose a person then too.  

The play began as a one-act show where two estranged twins meet up years after their mother’s death but one is off their face on psychedelics. They’re operating on a different level of emotion and conversation.

How can the two navigate this and find balance between them? Extending this idea obviously led to Allen’s scene with his brother but also applies to a lot of the relationships in the play. I mean two people couldn’t be on more different levels of experience than Burroughs and Allen, yet they have moments of intimate earnestness and camaraderie.  

I think there’s a deep longing for connection and freedom in all the characters of the play, which any Londoner can probably relate to trapped in a speeding metal box, silent amongst so many people. All these complex stories you’ll never know. Or you just want to be left alone, that works too. But the tube was certainly the birthplace of Lost Watches.  

How close to your real life are the experiences of Allen? Did you build on first-hand experience of grief?

Lorenzo: I would not behave like Allen but there have been some similar-ish life experiences which I have inflated or inverted for the sake of this show.  

For example, my mother had a bead shed when I was growing up, not a sculpting studio, and I never spent my nights curled up on its floor. In terms of grief, I’m happy to say my mother is alive and well.  

My most poignant experience of grief was with her mother. Without going into it too much here, I will give one example, which I think informed a lot of how grief is presented in the play. While she was at the hospital, she asked me to wheel her around to get some air. We got to a balcony, overlooking a still lovely but quite industrial part of Tuscany, and she said she wanted me to push her out into the sky so she could fly about. On one level, sad. But also ridiculous and unusual. There was almost something playful in how she said it. What can you reply to that?  

Alex, how are you approaching directing a character who spends most of the play alone, yet is surrounded by voices? Have you directed anything like this before?

Alex: My current film has a lead actor who is in 14 out of 28 scenes on his own, and wordlessly, in continuous shots. I'm interested in the inner life of characters, often characters that are indeed lonely, or misfits or rebels.  

The challenge of this character is he is paralysed by his depression, and boredom and stasis are hard things to pull off. However Lorenzo is an immensely passionate and intelligent actor, I first worked with him when he was 13 - and I believe he wasn’t dull then and he won’t be dull now.  

Who cares about being likeable so long as you aren’t dull. We approach the character like any other and dig deep and try and reveal new things as we go along. I think with a lonely character whose mental health is in tatters, you can be naturalistic and truthful but also - in certain parts of the play - unfettered and expressionistic. These two acting styles in the play will hopefully connect with the audience.  

How did your experience directing in film influence how you handled the surreal, dreamlike elements of Lost Watches?

Alex: I love non-verbal moments. I cling to those as a filmmaker. Sometimes the reaction gives you subtext and sometimes it’s where mystery and the unknown lies - which keeps you hooked as an audience. Moments where light and music and sound tell the story, where you can almost feel the characters heart beating belong in the theatre as well as on camera. I adore the collaborative nature of theatre-making and letting the collective imagination of the creative team run wild.  

The play lends itself to a few heightened moments - when we encounter the dust and just sit with it, when we see his mother at work, focused on sculpting. Where we see his boisterous brother’s regret in one look. These moments could of course work on film but they are also really fitting in a small, intimate stage like Park 90.  

And I have great faith in the production designer Rob Davis, who I’m currently collaborating with on my film; he is a consummate artist and storyteller who can turn his hand to any medium: Painting, sculpture, animation. He understands the surreal and makes it comprehensible, human. He can distil the heart of a story into a single image and he’s changed the way I look at the world forever.  

What would you like audiences to be left thinking about after the show?

Lorenzo: “That wasn’t half-bad.”  

Seriously though, I’d hope to conjure a feeling of childish wonder and reflection and to ask people to examine the things in their life that are blocking this wonder, stopping their own freedom even in the tiniest ways.  

Alex: Life is for the living; we are all beautifully flawed and we have so little time. Tick tock tick tock.  

Lost Watches comes to Park Theatre from Weds 30 July – Sat 23 Aug 2025. Find more details and tickets HERE

‍Image by Rob Davis