A showdown of shattering intensity
Frozen Theatre Royal Haymarket
In Doctor Foster, Mike Bartlett’s moreish hit BBC drama series tracking the implosion of a marriage in the detonating wake of infidelity, Suranne Jones gave the country an unforgettable portrait of a happy, contented doctor – Gemma Foster – turned haunted, obsessive liability, a betrayed woman dancing on the ledge of madness.
If almost 10 million people watched the season two finale last autumn, that was as much down to their investment in the character – and everything the Oldham-born actress had brought to it with great subtlety and depth – as the need to see what Bartlett had come up with by way of mind-boggling denouement.
Plenty of fans will now be tempted to see Jones take top billing in the West End for the first time, starring as Nancy, the mother of a girl who’s abducted, abused and killed by a paedophile in Bryony Lavery’s award-winning 1998 play Frozen. Not a cheery night out, then – and certainly not to be confused with the Disney musical ( just starting on Broadway). By coincidence, Jones is also appearing in a new Sky series Save Me, in which she plays a mum whose 13-year-old daughter is kidnapped.
It’s arguable that this role is her toughest assignment yet. Not just because she’s being forced to confront, nightly, every parent’s worst nightmare, but because Lavery gives so little opportunity for fully airing the emotional fallout of that sickening horror.
Despite its stagey first-half sequence of monologues, Frozen has an almost televisual restraint. Much of the heroine’s energy is spent on maintaining a façade of determined resolve. There’s a jump in time early on, too, from the remembered fateful moment Rhona set off to her grandmother’s, to Nancy’s bleak cherishing of the things in her daughter’s bedroom, seven months on, hoping against hope she’ll be back. No pleas to the public, interviews with police, wild lamentations. Jonathan Munby’s production projects multiple images of the vanished girl on its grey set of shifting panels, but the opportunities to find out more about her prove elusive.
Her face movingly wintry and drawn, Jones doesn’t disappoint – but, given the slow-burn, low-heat script, nor does she have much scope to wow. For much of the evening – which soon whizzes us across 20 years, to the point where the prolific culprit is apprehended – the focus is on the monster rather than the mother. The night – provocatively – belongs to Jason Watkins, who gives one of the finest performances of his career as the serial child-killer.
Watkins’s forte is comedy, and here he weaponises his natural affability. Just hearing his drably dressed Ralph blithely discuss, in a warm Brummie accent, his “centre of operations”, seeing him caress his illicit video hoard and watching him lock eyes on his young prey, spied in the distance, before conducting a one-sided conversation of calculated friendliness, is enough to induce nausea. Lavery isn’t after simple revulsion, though. Thanks to the intervention of Agnetha, a panicprone American criminal psychologist (played, nicely, by another face from the BBC mockumentary W1A, Nina Sosanya), the neurological explanation for Ralph’s empathy-void is laid out via a series of aptitude tests that affirm his (abusecaused) stunted development.
Can he be forgiven, on those grounds? That question sharpens to a point as grieving relative and her cold-hearted nemesis meet face-toface. Their brief encounter – a pitiful bid on Nancy’s part to break the ice in more than one sense – has a shattering intensity. It makes the play – and just about justifies this revival’s hefty ticket prices. But it’s a close-run thing.