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Frozen, National Theatre Cottesloe, London

Chilling drama on a burning issue

Paul Taylor
Monday 08 July 2002 00:00 BST
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Bryony Lavery's play Frozen tackles the emotive topic of murder by paedophiles, and it pulls off a remarkable feat. You feel that you could watch this play in the company of a bereaved parent without shame, since here, for once, art is not exploiting the subject in the interests of either punitive sensationalism or false redemptive uplift. The piece won two Best New Play awards when it was premiered at the Birmingham Rep in 1998. The superb original cast reunite now with director Bill Alexander for this welcome revival in the National's Cottesloe Theatre.

One sunny evening, two decades ago, 10-year-old Rhona went missing on the way to her grandma's. Frozen focuses on three people who, from their separate worlds of isolation and grief, deliver interlocking monologues and eventually converge, with devastating results, in our own time. Anita Dobson wrenches the heart as Rhona's mother Nancy, a very ordinary woman who first copes by congealing into a kind of public crusader for hope and then lapses into living death when the hideous facts become known. There's a deadly rigidity, too, in serial child-killer Ralph, a dour, unlovely loner (compellingly played by Tom Georgeson) who runs his sordid operations like some fanatical military campaign, and who handles his beloved collection of paedophile porn videos with a creepily misplaced tenderness, as though they were more alive and precious than the living children he encounters.

The third member of the trio – an American psychiatrist (Josie Lawrence) who is visiting London to lecture on her thesis "Serial Killing: A Forgiveable Act?" – is the least well realised. Equipped with an Icelandic background and a recent, guilty bereavement of her own, Dr Agnetha Gottmundsdottir is an almost ludicrously convenient device for hammering home the central metaphor of frozen emotions: "I guess it is in my Icelandic genes," she tells us from the lectern "to want to take myself and you... to the Arctic frozen sea that is the criminal brain."

Her theory is that many serial killers have been brain-damaged through abuse in childhood, their crimes committed because of illness rather than sin.

This view certainly complicates our perception of Ralph, but Lavery admirably refuses to let it simplify our understanding of what Nancy must harrowingly go through if she is to liberate herself from the icy prison of hatred, and forgive her daughter's murderer. In the scene in which she finally visits him and shows him family photographs of Rhona, absolution is not absolute but inextricably mixed with revenge. To forgive him, she must break through his delusion that he never really harmed or frightened his little victims, and to achieve this, she has to take him on a painful journey back into his own childhood. She leaves him with the double-edged gift of a hellish remorse that does not ennoble him or stop him from taking intermittent refuge in foul-mouthed denial, but which psychosomatically seizes him with burning convulsions.

Presented in a clinically stark, beautifully focused production, Frozen demonstrates its emotional maturity by refusing, in any simple sense, to take sides. In the excellent coda, in which Nancy and the psychiatrist chat in the church grounds after Ralph's bleak funeral, the recognition that forgiveness may well have driven this child-killer to suicide co-exists humanely with the acknowledgment that Nancy has already paid her dues to sadness over the 20 years of suffering that he caused her.

Kafka once wrote that a book should be the axe with which we smash the frozen sea within us. In the case of this fine play, and Anita Dobson's extraordinarily moving performance, that perception seems doubly true.

To 24 August (020-7452 3000)

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