7 July, 2005
Murray Bramwell

Frozen
by Bryony Lavery

State Theatre Company of South Australia.
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre.
6 July. Tickets $ 16.70 – $ 49.
Bookings BASS 131 246.
Until 23 July, 2005

Are terrible crimes, such as those of serial killers, a proof of evil or an extreme aberration ? And how, judicially and personally, do we deal with such events ? How do we reconcile outrage with a need to understand and, even, to forgive ? Are we dealing, asks Bryony Lavery in Frozen, with a sin or a symptom ?

Even when first performed in London in 2002, the play had a grim timeliness, coinciding as it did with the notorious Soham child murders and Lavery is ambitious in putting a human perspective on a subject most often demonised whether by Patricia Cornwell and Val McDermid or the eager tabloids. Lavery’s play intends to take us beyond stereotypes by presenting a child murder from the points of view of Nancy, a grieving mother, Agnetha, an American forensic psychiatrist and Ralph, the perpetrator, now convicted and imprisoned.

State Theatre director Catherine Fitzgerald makes much of the strengths of the play as it probes, initially through a succession of monologues, the characters’ preoccupations. Performing in the round, or rather, the square, on Gaelle Mellis’s set – thick enameled floor tiles smeared with earthy browns and forensic looking stains – the actors, under searching lighting from David Gadsden, express their apprehensions and their “frozen” inability to get beyond personal trauma.

It is now well known that, since the play first appeared, Bryony Lavery has been in bother with complaints of plagiarism from New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell and American researcher Dorothy Lewis, who bears more than passing resemblance to Agnetha. The relevance here is that it explains much about the balances in Lavery’s material. Her sympathies clearly lie with Nancy, the salt-of-the-earth mother ( based, perhaps, on Marian Partington, the sister of a Freddy West victim, whom, unlike Lewis, Lavery copiously acknowledges) Carmel Johnson plays her with sympathetic gusto (if in a sometimes disconcerting variety of Midlands accents) while Agnetha, the Icelandic empiricist (interpreted valiantly by Annabel Giles) is reduced to nervy, brittle and irritating American metro-mannerisms. Ralph, on the other hand, is a strong, disturbingly convincing portrait, played with compelling nuance by Nic Pelomis,

Lavery’s play begins well but becomes overlong, fragmented and unwieldy as themes she sets in motion become murky – or themselves, frozen. We do not know whether it is an irony that Nancy recants her wish to forgive or whether the play is skewed to blame the scientist. Briony Lavery is braving difficult territory here and this heartfelt production will undoubtedly engage audiences, but eventually, Frozen falls back on the cliches of the genre and I wonder whether Prime Suspect and Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker get just as close to the truth of this vexing and painful subject.

“Cold comfort after difficult journey” The Australian, July 8, 2005, p.17