"Bryony Lavery’s courageous 1998 play, Frozen, about the abduction, sexual assault and murder of a ten year old girl, arrived at the Brewhouse on Friday, trailing plaudits and awards. Part of the bravery of the work is Lavery giving a voice to the paedophile responsible for the crime. A sparse three-hander, the play is largely made of monologues: Nancy, the grieving numb mother of the victim; Agnetha, and American research academic interested in the psychology of serial killers, and Ralph, a lonely man who abducts and murders girls with cold, military precision.

The play opens with Agnetha preparing to depart for London. She checks her bags and documents, then, as if about to be sick, she begins to hyperventilate and suddenly opens her handbag, gives a grief-ridden scream into it, closes it and leaves. It is the only time in the play for raw grief; after that there are no histrionics, no shouting, screaming or outpourings of sentiment - just the emotional analysis of an unspeakable crime.

In Michael Cabot’s taut, yet elegantly modulated production, the power and emotion in Lavery’s writing is beautifully controlled. One has the sense throughout of being held, very delicately, at the still, calm centre of a whirlwind.

It is impeccably acted. Maggie O’Brien in particular is outstanding as Nancy, giving us a woman clinging onto the belief that her daughter is still alive, until she finds, 20 years later, that she died only yards from her home. The scene where she holds the dead girl’s skull and describes its beauty is unbearably poignant. As Agnetha, Carolyn Tomkinson is also a woman on the edge; grieving for her dead academic partner and recent lover, she immerses herself in working with serial killer Ralph, searching for forgiveness and compassion in his clinical coldness. And finally Ralph - here Peter Cadden is an intense, efficient man, indifferent to the pain he has inflicted until Nancy puts him in touch with his own cruel childhood. It is again a spellbinding performance - completely credible.

It is a harrowing play, but the acting is superb and the writing so finely tuned, so sensitively balanced between humour and passion, humanity and horror, that it carries you along to the glimmer of light and hope at the end."