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. Lavery doesn’t write like this. Each of her characters is a gobby chump who recites their thoughts and feelings like the town crier. The result is flat, empty, deadening.

The big box-office draw here is Suranne Jones, as Nancy, the grieving mum, but she’s hardly stretched playing a saintly northern drudge who shrieks and sniffles a lot, or stands up very erect, looking defiant and proud while chain-smoking. She’s composed of clichés. As is Ralph the psycho (Jason Watkins), who has a twitch, a limp, a Brummie accent, a beer gut, a bald patch, a creepy manner, a curved spine, a drink problem, a tattoo habit, no money, no brains, no job and no friends.

When the shrink starts to examine him she hasn’t a clue what she’s after. She measures his skull and sets him tests that are so arbitrary — ‘list some words beginning with f’ — that the results could be adduced as proof of any theory imaginable.