Thin Ice ****

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

EXCERPT: “As Thin Ice, a devised drama, skips around in time, it builds up a picture of these three people and their unusual relationships to one another, all in the context of Arctic exploration.”

Richard and Laura, a young married couple, arrive in a hut in Greenland to find their professor Daniel frozen to death. As Thin Ice, a devised drama, skips around in time, it builds up a picture of these three people and their unusual relationships to one another, all in the context of Arctic exploration. 

Well thought through and executed, the acting was strong from all three cast members and the development of relationships believable. This was an especially impressive feat to accomplish considering the non-chronological nature of the play, as well as the fact that Laura was way out of Daniel’s league, both aesthetically and socially, and her adoration of her fusty professor could have been quite hard to swallow. There were some strong directorial decisions, like the way that Daniel adopted his frozen dead pose from various places around the stage, seamlessly flitting between past and present. Whilst the projector screen was used to good effect, at times the use of the typewriter didn’t quite match up with the appearance of writing on the screen. 

Overall, it was an engaging production, although at an hour and a half it seemed a little unnecessarily long and perhaps lacked the emotional interest and an intriguing enough subject matter to make it really powerful.

Thin Ice was performed at the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Festival 2012. To find out more about this production, please go to the Ed Fringe website.