FROZEN. To 9 December.

Scotland

FROZEN
by Bryony Lavery

Rapture Theatre Tour to 9 December 2006
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 October at Arts Guild Theatre Greenock

Detailed map of emotional wastes in sympathetic production.
What’s it like when the unimaginable happens? Bryony Lavery’s outstanding play explores the question, and the emotional territory surrounding loss and despair in three people: ways they can become frozen and, falteringly experimenting with their own humanity, begin to thaw. Character and revelation unwrap each other so clearly it’s easy not to notice how Lavery prepares the major encounters through monologues, then leaves her characters again alone.

Openly expressed feelings would destroy this construction. Instead, lifelike detail gives the depth of 3-dimensional emotion. ‘That’ afternoon, says Nancy, her children’s behaviour meant she loved neither of them. How real. And how irrelevant, when one of her daughters disappears.

The abductor is already in custody when Nancy discovers the truth. The focus lies beyond cold retribution. Tom Georgeson’s original Ralph (at Birmingham Rep) was a masterpiece of inward death beneath a blank mask. His meeting with his victim’s mother, looking at family photographs, showed someone frozen to the core.

At Keswick this summer, David Tarkenter expressed inarticulate emotional chaos as Ralph tries to write an apology; illiteracy of emotion and language creating inner pandemonium. Here, John Kazek’s Ralph exudes an air of strangeness, though with children he adopts a gentle, subtly guilt-inducing temptation. Mummy would run a mile; but life is busy and mummy can’t always be there.

Initially, it’s overtly theatrical, but Kazek soon inhabits the role. Casually swigging coffee with Joanna Tope’s American psychologist, leaning on a table, a single low-key statement, expecting no contradiction, opens-up the murderer’s mind.

Kazek’s loping, grindingly inefficient mind is contrasted by Joanna Tope’s Agnetha, coping with her own complex of grief and making her own wrong decision, though the role at times comes close to that narrative outsider, The Expert.

It’s Gerda Stevenson’s Nancy who grabs the emotional reins. Aging beautifully through several costumes and 20 years, she’s ordinary and decent. But the ordinary becomes extraordinary when shaped by intense pressure. Conversationally informal or blazing with the force of a tragic protagonist, Stevenson is the heart of this intricate, yet clear, drama, which director Michael Emans stages with simple clarity on a not-to-be-missed tour.

Agnetha: Joanna Tope
Nancy: Gerda Stevenson
Ralph: John Kazek
Guard: Duncan R Edwards

Director: Michael Emans
Designer: Lyn McAndrew
Lighting: Simon Wilkinson
Sound: Graham Sutherland

2006-10-30 11:38:29