FringeReview UK 2024
Frozen
Greenwich Theatre
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Greenwich Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Rhona, 10, walks out of her parents’ house en route to her grandmother’s and never arrives. Over 20 years three characters come to terms in very different ways. Hailed by the Independent as one of the 40 greatest plays of all time, Bryony Lavery’s 1998 Frozen returns to London. It opens at Greenwich Theatre Directed by its artistic director James Haddrell till May 19th.
Frozen though is far more than a thriller: it’s an interrogation into the limits of what evil-doing is, what redemption and some capacity to forgive might be, and its consequences: and above all it ends in a thaw cracking like a Russian spring.
Directed by James Haddrell, Set and Costume Design Alex Milledge, Lighting Henry Slater, Sound Design Liam McDermott, PR Nancy Poole PR
Till May 19th
Review
Rhona, 10, walks out of her parents’ house en route to her grandmother’s and never arrives. Over 20 years three characters come to terms in very different ways. Hailed by the Independent as one of the 40 greatest plays of all time, Bryony Lavery’s 1998 Frozen returns to London. Lasting two hours 20, it opens at Greenwich Theatre directed by its artistic director James Haddrell till May 19th.
Termed a thriller, it’s not so clear that’s the right title, but what is for a thriller told slant? Lauded at the 2002 National Theatre production, it later secured four Tony nominations, was recently revived in the West End.
Lavery’s work as her 2007 Last Easter (a four-hander centred round a trip to Lourdes, revived at the Orange Tree in 2021) shows how she teases out moral ambiguities of huge reach in a little room. Redemption and resolution ripple through both plays.
Frozen explores three frozen people. One emotionally by the disappearance of her daughter. One morally by abuse arguably generating horrific actions. Another invokes Icelandic heritage with ice tropes; bringing ice-clarity to proceedings.
The work begins with three monologues. It almost settles into Brian Friel’s Faith Healer before Lavery slowly releases interactions: never more than a Turgenev-like duetting, but increasing tempo.
Alex Milledge’s set (and quiet costumes) is a strikingly simple revolve, divided by a gauze-permeable screen projected onto with images – often frozen ones – and dates to show time’s cascade, now updated, with Henry Slater’s lighting.
The whole isolates the two characters either side, continually replenished with props to show environment shifts from gardens to prison cells. Liam McDermott’s sound deftly interposes distant traffic, the world at bay: as from a shed, cell or cemetery.
Kerrie Taylor’s Nancy is Rhona’s mother. Over 20 years from laconically admitting she loves neither daughter or husband at the moment, Nancy registers shock through resolve in founding ‘Flame’ a charity involving missing children (one of whom actually turns up) through an extraordinary passage of grief and reconciliation with the past.
Buddhist-globe-trotting daughter Ingrid’s invoked as a separate voice; errant excluded husband Bob merely skirts consciousness. The release and decisions made are palpable and life-affirming.
Nancy’s role is partially a Calvary (as Lavery might put it in Last Easter). She’s the most emotionally present; and Taylor gives an astonishing performance, no more so than at the close of Act One with a howl of desolation, but also wry humour and laconic advice touched with a sharp reading of Agnetha’s studies.
Taylor, who often acts at Greenwich is possibly its best-kept secret, along with artistic director Haddrell.
James Bradshaw like Indra Ové has featured in Hollyoaks, though was last year seen in Ian Hallard’s The Way Old Friends Do directed by Mark Gatiss. There Bradshaw proved masterly in a flick of haplessness. Here he does it again in an unimaginably different role.
Softly spoken Ralph lures seven girls to the back of his van over 21 years. He prides himself on organisation. When someone goes missing in Scotland, he scorns the idiocy of those who link other disappearances. “Oh no, oh no, oh no” he tuts repeatedly as Lavery invests him with speech-patterns and coping mechanisms born of ritual and limited imagination. His “centre of operations”, a shed, has a radius of 80 miles.
It’s left to Iceland-heritage American psychiatrist Agnetha to address the audience as at a seminar, citing her colleague David, in brain abnormalities in serial killers and others deemed psychopaths.
We see her emerge on an aisle in fraught conversation or email to her colleague David; later to his wife, her best friend Martha. These outbursts humanise the chill ellipse of Agnetha’s professionalism.
Agnetha’s and others’ assertions are simple: Abuse including physical brain injury and frozen development of cortex given to empathy, is responsible for commonly-termed evil actions. Agnetha goes into detail over scans and cerebral development. It’s not their fault: they’re victims too.
This might reinforce for instance Jon Ronson’s sceptical book The Psychopath Test. That volume ends septically in how to calibrate 40 degrees of psychopathy, and begs questions.
None of it touches this pathologised theory, which others might compare to a kind of applied phrenology with those childhood bumps, dunkings, scans.
Ové moves from high-stress on the periphery of the stage to serene on it. Her encounters with Bradshaw purr with brisk civility, even reveals to gain Ralph’s confidence.
Ové’s Agnetha refuses to monster. She moves from lecturer to relating to other protagonists with a purr, a quizzical scepticism (she doesn’t like unsolicited dencounters) or finally, a confiding question. Throughout, you see levers preparing to unlock her.
Yet Agnetha can’t unlock the freeze. Two predictable things happen. Frozen though is far more than a thriller: it’s an interrogation into the limits of what evil-doing is, what redemption and some capacity to forgive might be, and its consequences: and above all it ends in a thaw cracking like a Russian spring.
