REVIEW: The Freeze, Ustinov Theatre, Bath. Other people's lives look so straightforward from the outside.

It's a point made by the narrator at the opening of this striking piece of drama from Theatre Alibi, and an idea turned into a sophisticated psychological examination of what makes us who we are, how the past shapes current choices and how we cope with major, life-changing events.

The life-changing events here are the onset of a new Ice Age thanks to global warming and, on a smaller scale, an unplanned pregnancy.

The visually inventive piece saw the three performers, each playing several characters, switch slickly and convincingly from one persona to another with, say, just the removal of a clerical collar or a change of coat.

The Freeze tackles some uncomfortable issues child sex abuse, the death of a young boy things which the memory cannot flee from.

The effective, bleak set was used as a metaphor for the mind, with those memories, and the characters associated with them, chasing around the stark grey layers of walls and melting into each other with a dream-like or nightmarish sense of logic.

And so we discover, with devastating clarity, why Mark (Henry Hawkes) would rather run away to become a priest than face up to his responsibilities as a father-to-be, and how a chance disaster makes him change his mind.

It's a haunting piece, made all the more so with a stunning soundtrack by Spiro. One to linger in the memory.

Dawn Gorman