Frozen

Submitted by on 7 August, 2002 - 12:00

'Frozen' at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, London
until Saturday August 24th 2002

It helps to know what you’re watching. Maybe then I’d have my psychological armour in place and not be streaming tears just minutes into ‘Frozen’ at the National Theatre. But that’s what it’s like. Nobody is ever prepared for their child to be abducted, for the months possibly years of waiting and not knowing, for the small bones finally dug up from some outhouse to be identified as their child.

Grief seems too small a word for the raw annihilating awfulness of such an experience. It’s a credit to the intelligence of Bryony Lavery’s script that she doesn’t stop there. This play doesn’t just recreate that emotion, it asks awkward, at times very brave, questions about what grief and pain can do to a person, how the ‘monsters’ of sensationalist journalism are created from hurt children.

Brave because it goes beyond anguished sympathy to portray how vengeful bereaved parents can become monstrous too. Anita Dobson plays Nancy, the mother whose 10 year old daughter goes off to visit grandmother and disappears. We see her transformation into a minor celebrity. While always empathising with her need to cling onto doomed hope, there’s also something overbearing and dislikeable in the character. I felt again that unease as when seeing the mothers of James Bulger or the child victims of the Moors murderers. The enormity of their grief, the unimaginable dreadfulness perpetrated on those children, gives them an aura of moral unassailability. But, rationally, and this is the brave question the play poses, does it give them any privileged say in how we should deal with the perpetrators? Or does the very understandable violence of their response make them least qualified to judge rationally?

These are intensely explosive questions. When Solidarity ran an article on the inadequacy of the legal institutions to deal with paedophile child killers and advocating preventive detention it generated the biggest post bag for some time. In the play, the psychologist, played by Josie Lawrence, is addressing a seminar on the topic: Serial Killing a Forgivable Act? When the victims are children, most people would answer with a straight no. If not forgiveness, an overly moralistic category, how about rehabilitation? Again the popular response would be no, backed up by carefully selected evidence that these people are incorrigible. The answer generally comes before the evidence.

Where do we get this idea that child murderers are uniquely incorrigible? Even when the perpetrators are themselves children? (And, in a sense, the perpetrators, whatever their age, are abused children self-protectively locked out from feeling their own pain and therefore anyone else’s. This is electrifying played by Tom Georgeson as Ralph the killer.) One mechanism is that we find their acts uniquely incomprehensible, so we cast them as non-human monsters, not susceptible to the normal psychological pressures and inducements. But denying the humanity of anyone, whatever their crimes, is itself monstrous and can lead us to behave monstrously.

Is this just knee-jerk liberalism? It may be liberal humanism, which I think is preferable to savagery, but it is not unthought out. When my daughter was about 10 and I was ranting in response to whatever the current appalling story of child abuse and murder, she made me promise that if anything ever happened to her I would not seek revenge. It’s a sobering commitment. It means if anything ever did (what’s the secular equivalent of ‘God forbid’?) and I wanted revenge I wouldn’t be able to invoke her memory. I’d be on my own. I’d be doing it to make myself feel better.

Whoops, there goes the moral high ground. But liberating rationality is better.
Anita Dobson gets her revenge, and frees herself from the ice-lock of her role as bereaved mother, by making Ralph confront his own frozen pain and the pain he has inflicted in his attempt to not feel it.
Score: 8/10
Reviewer: Gerry Byrne

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