Review by Harry Bower
⭐️⭐️⭐️
First staged in 1998, Bryony Lavery wrote her play Frozen long before Disney’s global mega hit took the film and theatre world by storm. In its own very different way, this original Frozen must have been equally dramatic in its impact on audiences. The play is centred around the abduction, sexual abuse and murder of ten-year-old Rhona and the impact on her mother Nancy, and Ralph, the paedophile who killed her. The triple hander is completed by Agnetha, a criminal psychologist dealing with her own form of moral isolation, running away from her problems for an academic secondment to the UK where she studies serial killers and reports on her findings to us, the audience of her lectures.
Through a series of monologues, the piece unfolds slowly and meticulously; it is written in such a way that suspense builds quietly. There are no jump scares and rarely physical danger to the characters we are watching. Instead, the thrilling aspect of the play is psychological and delivered with unabashed honesty and directness. Ralph, played with a calm confidence and chilling lack of remorse by James Bradshaw, describes intimately the process of luring his victims and inflicting such horror. Nancy, a standout performance by Kerrie Taylor, swings from uncontrollable rage to distraught grief in a rollercoaster which barely seems to stand still, never masking the rawness of her emotion. Indra Ové is the overwhelmed and agitated Agnetha – a mysterious and unsettled character withholding their truth until the end, always somewhat restrained with an air of arrogance.
Just as the monologues become tiresome Lavery relinquishes, and we finally see some dialogue between characters as Agnetha begins interviewing and examining Ralph, in prison. Imagine pretty much any psychologist-criminal scene in any true crime TV show and you’ll get the picture; it’s a back and forth, a curious mind interrogating a protective one. These scenes sometimes linger for too long but contribute to what should be the more momentum-building moments of revelation for the audience in which Agnetha explains her thesis in lecture form. These moments though were messy on press night and contributed instead to a lack of cohesion.
Designer Alex Milledge has created a basic but effective set on a striking and dominating revolve which seems constantly on the move, revealing Nancy’s domestic life on one side and the dark world of Raph’s imprisonment on the other. Agnetha is offered the wide auditorium for her opening scenes which in principle works well but in reality underwhelms – if you’re planning on seeing this production, don’t sit in the front quarter. Overall though the direction is excellent. It can be challenging for monologues in static spaces to be consistently engaging and to keep the audience’s gaze for the duration. To Artistic Director James Haddrell’s credit, that’s never the case here. Projections and an atmospheric lighting design by Henry Slater create a world which feels safely held but never boring.
Billed as a thriller and hailed by The Independent as one of the 40 greatest plays of all time, with Tony nominations and a recent West End revival to its name, I was expecting a well-written piece; and Frozen mostly lives up to that. Characters and their motivations are well rounded in their approach to relationships and reactions to such horrific acts, presumably (hopefully) imagined, are realistic and believable. There is humour sprinkled throughout, and Nancy’s emotional journey from despair to acceptance is exceptionally well acted. All of the performers in fact do their best to represent the material in as authentic a way as possible.
Unfortunately for me much of the impact of the piece is lost, because our tolerance and exposure to stories like this is now so much higher. In 1998 when the piece was written, hearing a criminal on stage describe how he murdered a child and buried them under his shed will have been much more shocking than it is now, when I can freely access a hundred stories about child killers on Netflix. That meant, to me, the more shocking scenes and dialogue felt gratuitous and outdated.
As an intense exploration of what makes criminals tick and the isolating nature of dealing with the far-reaching consequences of child murder, Frozen is smart. By presenting the antagonistic scientific argument that serial killers are mentally unable to feel remorse, chemically different to ‘normal’ people – the piece provokes debate in its audience and will evoke strong reactions either for or against Agnetha’s hypothesis. Overall though it comes across messy and outdated. For a production with so much going for it with a great cast and creative set, it feels frozen in time.
Bryony Lavery’s Frozen plays at Greenwich Theatre until 19 May 2024. For more information visit: https://greenwichtheatre.org.uk/events/frozen/
Photos by Danny Kaan
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