Frozen at Greenwich Theatre is not the musical but Bryony Lavery’s 1998 award-winning play. For its age, this play that uses an event of child abduction to examine the criminal mind remains topical and disturbingly thought-provoking with its focus on the idea that the compulsion to abuse is predetermined.
The first part of the play is a series of monologues that serves to establish Nancy as a loving mother destroyed by 10-year-old Rhona’s disappearance, Ralph as calculating and clever with a chillingly simple outlook and Agnetha a criminal psychologist whose area of study is the contribution of childhood abuse in the creation of an adult abuser.
American Agnetha has taken up an academic post in London in unhappy circumstances, and the tone of the play shifts when she starts to study Ralph over a series of interviews in which he manifests the brain disturbances that deprive him of moral judgement. Each session is followed by Agnetha’s lecture interpreting the significance of his responses in keeping with her thesis that connects a pattern of changes in brain formation with child abuse.
Agnetha’s Icelandic heritage underlies an ongoing theme of freezing and unfreezing. Ralph’s brain could be said to have set malformed, leaving him without the conceptual tools for understanding and change.
By contrast, Nancy, who gets stuck in a cycle of desperate hope and grief, building up a volcano of vengeful hate against Ralph, seems able to find a way through to living differently with her history. Similarly, Agnetha is having to reimagine herself in a new job, in a different country without her long-term academic collaborator.
The frozen-melting analogy is reflected in video projected against Alex Milledge’s impressively effective set, which serves to isolate Ralph and Nancy from each other, the near-transparent gauze that divides them allowing enough of a fade-out as the stage revolves to feel like a trespassing vapour trail.
Kerrie Taylor reaches gut-wrenching pitch as Nancy, who works through decades of anger and helping families in the same situation through to a reconciliation of sorts, although the transition could have been clearer and director James Haddrell could also have shored up the final scene.
Indra Ové’s Agnetha is disadvantaged by her first two scenes being sited in the auditorium, where poor sightlines diminished their import, but there is strength in the unspoken consequences of her academic findings. The unassertive Ralph is played by James Bradshaw with a sinister guilelessness that belies the extremes of cruelty of which he is capable.
Frozen is billed as a thriller and at first it isn't clear this is quite right, but on reflection, the twists are there in the dark water under the ice.