Frozen had all of the ingredients to become a chilling, thought-provoking drama. It explores the relationship between a serial killer and the mother of a victim. The play begins with the incoherent monologues of the respective characters as they stare emptily into the room. As the play progresses the audience are intermittently addressed by a criminal psychologist whom is conducting a study into the root causes of a serial killer’s brain.

However, although this plot had the potential to ask some deep questions about whether evilness is innate or owed to external influences, the pace of the production was unbearably slow: it lasted for 140 minutes with no interval. The person next to me fell asleep at one point – and when they woke up, they hadn’t missed anything. If this production’s intention was to show what it is like to be mentally insane, I certainly felt slightly schizophrenic at many points.

The victim’s mother, played by Xelia Mendes-Jones, loudly and rhythmically shuffled around the stage again and again, rambling with long pauses in her monologues. Eleanor Lind Booton must be congratulated on maintaining her constant twitching and shuddering for the full two hours. While convincing and certainly unnerving, this approach did not suffice to reveal the full psychology of the killer - if the killer himself didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on, then we couldn’t really gain an insight into his motives. The star of the show was undoubtedly Rachel Weiss, who played the tormented investigating criminal psychologist. Unfortunately, the strength of her eerie and unrelenting performance was also the audience’s downfall, as she emphasised how slow the others were. 

The set was reminiscent of the Spanish horror film The Orphanage, with the walls covered with a cacophony of images that accurately depicted the deranged mind set of the prisoner. Faces screaming, scribbled out figures, crosses and angry lines, provided a claustrophobic and disturbing feel. The stage was portioned with a thick trail of white powder that became blurred over the course of the play in a deeply symbolic way that confessedly I don’t quite understand. The play culminated in a moving climax that should have been shattering, yet fell slightly flat; the themes and acting had been so consistently disturbing and tense that the ending was just more of the same. The audience were visibly wilting.

Frozen was an unsettling account of how loss can permanently pervade and consume one’s mind. In some ways, the structure of the play represented this very effectively; the audience wanted to escape a traumatic experience we’d had to endure for far too long.