Frozen will run at Greenwich Theatre from 26 April – 19 May 2024.
Greenwich Theatre's searing new production of Bryony Lavery's landmark play Frozen features Kerrie Taylor (Greenwich Theatre's Vincent River, Where The Heart Is, The Bay) as Nancy, James Bradshaw (Endeavour, Primeval, Hollyoaks) as Ralph, and Indra Ové (Sex Education) as Agnetha. Directed by Artistic Director James Haddrell, the creative team also includes designer Alex Millidge, lighting designer Henry Slater and sound designer Liam McDermott.
The mother of a murdered child. Her imprisoned killer. A criminal psychologist attempting to understand what drove him to do it. Set in present-day England, Bryony Lavery's Frozen focuses on the search for missing 10-year old girl Rhona and the dramatic years that follow.
Hailed by The Independent as one of the 40 best plays of all time, Lavery's thriller won the TMA Best Play Award, the Eileen Anderson Central Television Award, and earned four Tony Award nominations when it played on Broadway in 2004.
James Haddrell, Director:“I'm thrilled to be tackling this challenging play with such a strong, established cast. The play dramatises every parent's worst nightmare, the loss of a child. I only became a parent fairly recently, and both Kerrie and Indra have also brought up children, so I'm sure that rehearsals, and the process of staging this play in general, will have a huge resonance with all of us. I've also been a huge fan of James Bradshaw for years. Ralph is such a complicated character, guided by his own tilted version of morality, so it needed an actor of James' intelligence and commitment to bring him to life.”
Kerrie Taylor on playing Nancy: “I don't think I've ever been as shocked by a play as the first time I read Frozen. Bryony Lavery's writing has the extraordinary power to examine and seek to understand the hardest imaginable experience and challenges you to ask the questions its protagonists have to ask, about each other and themselves. One day Nancy's 10 year-old daughter walked out of her house and she never came back. The myriad of other possibilities for that day, the tragedy of the course it took, ripples through all the years of her life until Nancy does the most courageous thing of all. It's truly the longest, hardest journey I'll ever go on with a character and I'm privileged to be offered the chance to take it.”
Greenwich Theatre, owned by the Royal Borough of Greenwich, has been a home for live entertainment since 1855, and has been operated by Greenwich Theatre Ltd since 1969. In 2024, the company signed a 24-year lease guaranteeing the future of the venue.
The theatre's Offie-nominated return to producing led by artistic director James Haddrell has included work by Michael Frayn, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter, Philip Ridley and Mike Bartlett, with family work by Russ Tunney, Anthony Clarke, Tracy Power, Sally Cookson, Adam Peck and Le Navet Bete. An online programme during the pandemic included a string of premieres including work by Caryl Churchill and Steven Berkoff, and an online appearance by Dame Helen Mirren.
The Greenwich Children's Theatre Festival, originally launched in 2008 with the support of Royal Greenwich and the Docklands Light Railway, has been presented every year since, with online programmes during the pandemic.
The company's support for emerging artists has included everything from marketing and tour-booking to dramaturgy and company development, with supported artists aided in touring around the country and to Edinburgh, Dublin, Madrid, Adelaide and New York.
Alongside Frozen, Greenwich Theatre's productions for 2024 include Jez Butterworth's The River (1 – 27 October) with a cast including Paul McGann, and new family productions Beauty and the Beast (2 – 25 August) and Dick Whittington and his Cat (22 December – 5 January).
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