Out of the Margins

"Of course, NOW, Disney have a piece called Frozen. When I say I wrote Frozen, there is the inescapable disappointment for people when I have to say, 'Not that Frozen'..." 

So begins Bryony Lavery's annotations of the original Frozen, her "big, brave, compassionate play about grief, revenge, forgiveness and bearing the unbearable" (The Guardian). Bryony Lavery annotates her play as if distance has given her sublime clarity. Questions like "Do children these days still have a Nature Table?" and exclamations like "Oh, I do love Ingrid!" litter the pages of this well annotated edition. It's wonderful to watch a writer in full swing. There's the real practical side of things too: about the Tibetan prayer flags at the end of the section called Seventeen: A Line of Washing, she notes "We never worked out how to make them blow in the wind." Find out which scene "took 20 minutes to write. Haven't change a thing. I wish all writing came as easily." 

Bryony Lavery's Frozen was winner of the TMA Best New Play award and the Eileen Anderson Central Television Award for Best Play. Frozen premiered at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1998. In 2019, Frozen was listed by The Independent as one of the 40 best plays ever written.