Killer instinct

Frozen starts with a shrink having a panic attack. She hyperventilates into her hand-bag and then gets drunk on an aeroplane where she yells out, ‘We’re all going to die.’ She’s a bit loopy, clearly, which is how lazy playwrights make psychologists interesting. The shrink’s task is to examine Ralph, a serial murderer of children, and to deliver a lecture on the cause of his malignity. We hear bits from the lecture, bits of confession from Ralph, and weepy bits from the mother of one of Ralph’s victims.

The subject is punishingly gruesome but its dramatic power is non-existent because the writer Bryony Lavery hasn’t learned how to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Good dramatic dialogue works obliquely, and enigmatically, through concealment and partial revelation which is sometimes involuntary and sometimes deliberate. This gives the audience an active role in the process of gathering and sifting the threads and half-threads and trying to assess what, if any, meaning they render.