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On Ice, a monologue by Suzanne Grotenhuis, was performed at the Abbey Theatre’s Peacock Stage as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2019. Initially intimate and open, the play felt friendly and straightforward: Grotenhuis’ narrator was going to tell us why exactly she dropped several grand on the ice-skating rink that dominated the stage. Its play-out is less straightforward, becoming a fragmented exploration of loneliness and isolation.
The set was simple, and functional. There was, of course, the large ice-skating rink that covered all the flooring, bordered by Ikea packing boxes, and a fridge upstage left. The downstage border to the rink was lined with ice skates of various sizes, which Grotenhuis, joked (worryingly frequently for those who don’t enjoy audience participation) that the spectators would use to join her onstage for a skate. Yet, fortunately or not, the audience members were not invited. Instead, what Grotenhuis offered as an inclusive element to her production, in fact cut her off from the audience, creating a theatrical wall between house and stage, quite literally setting the scene for an exploration of loneliness.
The slapstick elements in the early part of the performance at first nurtured a casual and familiar audience-performer relationship: genuinely laughing with the performer added a relaxing flow to the performance. But as the play progressed the tangential nature of the script began to break this relationship down. The story the audience was promised was fragmented by isolated stories from ballet, to Blind Willie Nelson and the Golden Record, to frozen lakes, as Grotenhuis explored tangents, themselves isolated stories within the framework of her piece, that revolved around the human experience of isolation and loneliness. Further than establishing this as a theme, the trust and familiarity that she had initially nurtured began to collapse: she consistently evaded the narrative she initially promised the audience, alienating her as a narrator, and only adding to her own isolation. The narrative’s conclusion, drawing together the various strands of fragmented stories, which, improbably, tied in to the overarching, much-evaded narrative, was, however, somewhat underwhelming. The denouement was neat and each tangential element was interlaced into the narrative’s conclusion but, while structurally very elegant, it was vague and felt almost unfinished. It lacked the unifying intention that drives elements of a piece together and rather seemed coincidental. Perhaps this was intentional, but as an audience member I was slightly left wanting.
