Frozen

By Bryony Lavery

Frozen is a three-handed portrait of a pedophile/murderer, a criminal psychologist, and the mother who has lost her child at the hands of the pedophile. It is a clear-eyed, restrained, and intelligent play about how stricken individuals contain their grief--and moreover contain their emotions generally for fear of losing themselves to rage, vengeance and pain. Twisting the knife, as it were, with delicacy and nuance, Lavery builds her play on a contrapuntal structure of alternating monologues by each of the characters, bracketed by tense duets between the murderer and psychologist, and the psychologist and the grieving mother. The play culminates in a strange, eerie meeting between the murderer and his victim's mother. Throughout all the interlocking solos and duets is felt the presence of the victim herself: a ten-year-old girl named Rhona who has disappeared on her way to her grandmother's house (not unlike Little Red Riding Hood), never to return. Rhona is the play's driving force even though she is absent from the stage. Her death serves as the catalyst for the three characters' emotional awakenings. Throughout the course of the play the image which continues to haunt even the most mundane of conversations is that of this innocent girl who has been violated and killed by a seemingly ordinary man.