Thin Ice

Extreme landscapes always magnify dark tensions – think of Conrad's jungle in Heart of Darkness or the desert in The English Patient. The same is true here in Jonathan Young's brittle, blistering vision of the Arctic, the setting for his glacial World War II thriller.

Professor Daniel Steinburg is an Austrian glaciologist, a repressed man whose composure only hints at softening when he listens to Schubert. After his body is discovered by young couple Richard and Laura, with a collection of letters and a brown dossier stuck fast in his frozen hands, episodic flashbacks carefully excavate the stories of their entwined lives, revealing a world plagued by tensions of national identity, hidden truths and unrequited love. All this is set against a backdrop of the 'weather war,' the Allies' and Germany's race for control of the Arctic in order to predict patterns in the weather.

Young is a masterful builder of tension, scraping away layers of social manners to let conflicts erupt between his characters. There's a brilliant scene where Richard coldly goads the serious Daniel with British debating rituals. Similarly the love story of Daniel and Laura is as full of pathos as it is intrigue.

But there are also several threads which tantalisingly beg further exploration; the relationship between the colonised Inuit and their changing colonisers; Daniel's fascination with the way ice packs and preserves history. Nevertheless taut storytelling and a magnetic cast draw you into this play and watching it feels almost like skin sticking to ice, impossible to pull away.