Description of the play
'Frozen' written by Bryony Lavery.
“One evening ten year
old Rhona goes missing. Her mother Nancy, retreats into a state of
frozen hope. Agnetha, an academic, comes to England to research a
thesis titled “Serial Killings: A Forgivable Act?” Then there's
Ralph, a loner with a bit of a record who’s looking for some
distraction … Drawn together by horrific circumstances, these three
embark upon a long, dark journey that finally curves upward into the
light in this big - brave, compassionate play about grief, revenge,
forgiveness and bearing the unbearable.” (The Guardian)
Robert Hewison of The
Sunday Times (London) describes it thus: 'A profound, hypnotising
drama about the moral and emotional effect on both the relatives of
victims and the murderer.... (It) rewards you at last with a sense of
understanding and release.'
In Frozen the
playwright Bryony Lavery examines the almost unbearable subject of
abducted and murdered children ( young girls in this case) but
carefully manages to avoid either sensationalism or sentimentality.
Her play 'Frozen' has a cast of three characters, (with two extra –
non speaking roles in the original text and Birmingham Rep 1998
production) who speak as much to the audience as they do to each
other later in the play. The majority of the writing is structured
through individual soliloquy and further into the play develops into
two person dialogues.
The story:
The mother Nancy, sends
her ten year old daughter Rhona round to her grandma's with a pair of
secateurs and never sees her again. She conducts her own fraught
journey of initial dis-belief and terror at one of her two daughters
going missing to that of support for other families in equally
terrible strife through a support organisation called FLAME.
The American
psychiatrist, Agnetha Gottsmundottir, is exploring an academic
theory that child abuse causes profound and pathological changes in
the structure of the brain as surely as physical injury does and
brings herself, and her clinical and personal convictions, to study
Ralph in soliarty confinement and lecture on her findings.
Many years after Rhona
disappears, Ralph is caught and it becomes Agnetha's job to
interrogate him in prison. It quickly becomes clear that he provides
further proof for her theory, in particular that abused children lack
the ability to create emotional bonds, that their brains actually
look different from those with happier backgrounds.
Ralph Ian Wantage is
the serial killer of young girls who cares only for his tattoos and
his secret collection of child porn videos. He is an isolated
obsessive whose sensibilities and conscience are indeed, Frozen.
Ralph shows no remorse at all; his only concern is that killing girls
isn't legal. He fantasises about a childhood in which he was 'spoilt
rotten' and his mum and dad sat around reading poetry. To Nancy,
however, he describes a father who washed his mouth out with soap and
water and beat him viciously on the side of his head. Forced by Nancy
to recognise what he has done, he is unable to cope any more, commits
suicide.
Playing Ralph:
The director Gill Scott
and the
Lace Market Theatre cast discussed the themes of the play at length and I watched
the acclaimed film The Woodsman (Kevin Bacon) and read several
articles about the grim subject of child abduction and murder. Not
easy reading but interesting in trying to understand the motives of
the character I was to play. The director and I discussed how he
would move, dress, talk and behave and it was agreed that he would
dress quite smartly with a shirt and tie and be clean shaven. Most of
the first act her wears a casual jacket to hide the tattoos on his
arms that were revealed later in the play. We felt that he strove to
be as 'normal' as he could be, to avoid detection.
Ralph's character
'celebrates' his killings with a tattoo after each event and as he
travels around the northern parts of the country in his van he
gets to know the best tattooists around certain areas. The tattoos
were described in the text, that he confesses to the audience. as
being all over his body.
The first practical
problem that raised itself was how do we do these tattoos? I looked
all over for some fake ones that could be applied each night but the
tattoos were so specific (Sunburst dagger of Death – Angels
fighting with devils) that it would have been very hard to find the
right sort. After a fair battle to find a solution the actress
playing Agnetha came up with a solution. She had a friend who might
be agreeable to coming to the theatre prior to every performance to
paint them on my arms. Luckily this young lady was a skilled face
painter and applied her skills to creating some false tattoos based
on my designs. When he tells the audience of his all over body tattoo
prowess I just alluded to the others that were positioned on his back
and legs.
Regarding the speech
patterns of Ralph; I decided that his voice would have a slight
impatient tone about it except where he got to his need to 'groom'
the young girls and gain their trust in accepting a lift in his van
from them. Then I changed his tone to something more avuncular as I
thought, and the director concurred, his normal gravelly tone would
just frighten his victim away. The often staccato text (for Ralph)
itself helped in developing this decidedly odd character's way of
behaving. He says “obviously” regularly throughout the play which
to me indicated a man with very little patience and some of his other
language is almost military – 'my centre of operations and
logistically' and everything is spoken of as needing to be very
organised. When he finally converses with Agnetha and the mother for
often fabricates stories of his idyllic early family life and only
when the mother presents to him, in a very gentle way, photos of the daughter he has
killed, does the realisation of what he has done
start to hit home.
He was a very
interesting character to play – some interesting foul language to
work with and some dark moments to get through but overall I
'enjoyed' – if that's the word – playing Ralph each night in a
very close and confined studio performance where you were very much
in the audience's very nervous faces. There is often reference to
catharsis in theatrical terms and the way this play ends the audience
certainly have a cathartic ending. Obviously!
As the play was very episodic I made myself a list during the later rehearsals to remind myself of my entrances and exits and where I sat in this complex jigsaw of a play. I didn't use it during the week's run but it certainly helped to clarify what was what and indeed where.
Phil Lowe
Amazon link above to a selection of plays by Byrony Lavery including Frozen. Click on link above to order.
Review from the
Nottingham Post
Torments in the cold
Frozen by Bryony Lavery
Alan Geary
'From the moment we
hear his harsh and fractured ramblings, and see his awkward gait,
darting glances and madly rolling eyes we're convinced that Ralph
(Phil Lowe) is a serial killer. This isn't caricature, this is
frightening, accomplished acting. And, in the end, Lowe makes his
character pathetic.
Bryony Lavery's
beautifully wrought play, directed by Gill Scott as a studio piece,
takes us deep into the mind of a child murderer.
It's also an
exploration of the emotional plights of Nancy (Maeve Doggett), the
mother of one of his victims, and Agnetha (Sylvia Robson), a
psychiatrist studying the case, torn between professional duty and
personal need – shades of Equus here.
Whether she's hanging
out the washing or addressing a public meeting, Doggett never lets us
forget that she's a soul in anguish.
And Agnetha, with her
ringing American voice, professionally assertive but actually as
vulnerable as her subjects, is brilliantly captured by Robson.
The three are talking
sometimes to the theatre audience, sometimes to the audience at a
lecture. And the narrative moves back and forth into different
pockets of time. There's strong language and revolting dialogue but
it is never gratuitous.
Thematically it's
deeply upsetting -obviously; it's also sometimes touching. Despite
the worrying confusion between the concepts of psychopath and
paedophile, as a piece of theatre it could hardly be more rewarding.'
Alan Geary.
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