DETAILS

Frozen by Sage Theatre
Pumphouse Theatre
Thursday, February 26 - Saturday, March 14

More in: Theatre

If you’re looking for a light evening at the theatre, don’t go to Sage Theatre’s current offering, Frozen. If, however, you’re up for a night of unrelenting intensity, this is the show for you.

Directed by Kevin McKendrick, Frozen examines the mind of a serial killer and the impact he has upon the mother of one of his victims. Bryony Lavery is a British playwright who is known for writing plays with strong roles for women, and this play is her most famous work. It was nominated for a Tony Award for best play in 2004.

Duncan Ollerenshaw steals the show with his role as Ralph, the pedophile and child-killer. I have not seen a more disturbing and chilling onstage portrayal of a demented mind — complete with hunched shoulders, strange gait, flickering eyes and a crooked mouth. My only criticism is that the British dialect he uses is almost too accurate. It’s so heavy, I found it difficult to understand everything he was saying.

Shauna Baird takes on the role of the mother, Nancy, whose 10-year-old daughter fails to return home one day from an errand to her grandmother’s house. The audience first meets Nancy in 1982, the year her daughter goes missing, and she stays with the audience for 20 years, until 2002. Baird is stellar in her portrayal of a mother whose worst nightmare has come true. She goes through an expansive emotional journey, from grief, to hope, to rage, passing through what-ifs and eventually to forgiveness and joy. It is this wide-ranging exploration of emotions that makes her performance so compelling.

Rounding out the speaking roles is Valerie Planche, who takes on the character of Agnetha, an academic who researches the “frozen” brains of serial killers. She presents her thesis on “crimes of illness versus crimes of evil,” which she explains as “symptoms versus sins.” The thesis, presented as fact in the play, contains a great deal of fascinating data such as statistics on the brains of children who have suffered abuse (I’m trusting Lavery here, as I left feeling I’d actually learned something from Agnetha’s thesis).

Agnetha is mourning the loss of her friend and colleague and, as the audience discovers, dealing with a “crime of evil” of her own. Though grief cannot be quantified scientifically, and everyone experiences it in their own way, I found Planche’s expression of sorrow somewhat overdone and theatrical compared to Baird’s more nuanced performance. Moreover, Agnetha’s personal journey over the course of the play is confusing. It opens with a dramatic outburst of sorrow as she says goodbye to her house in America and, near the end of the play, she’s kicking it up onstage with a rendition of “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” during which she sarcastically refers to herself as “sad woman.” Agnetha seems the same at the beginning and at the end of the play. Maybe that’s the point. More clarity on Agnetha’s personal journey would have strengthened the production.

There is a fourth character in the play who, though he doesn’t speak, takes on various roles, such as the prison guard and the man in the morgue, and is integral in set changes.

The set is minimal and stark white, a nod to the frozen metaphor of the play. It has an appropriate institutional feel to it, as though it could be a psychiatric ward, morgue or jail cell. The characters sit facing each other from the four corners of the stage throughout the whole show, moving to the centre when it’s their turn to perform. The scene changes, of which there are many, are flawless, never interrupting the drama or momentum of the production.

Frozen forces a person to think about things like criminal culpability, the impact of abuse, capital punishment and the possibility of forgiveness.