Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones is moved by a mother's chilling plight

One of Peter Porter's fine recent poems is called "Going into the Garden with the Wrong Seca-teurs". At the beginning of Bryony Lavery's poetic play Frozen, a little girl goes to Grandma's garden with the wrong secateurs: or rather, she makes her way to Grandma's garden, like Little Red Riding Hood, with secateurs, at the wrong moment - providing a rare "window of opportunity" for her murderer.

The story is horribly familiar: a child lost, believed missing; then, some years later, the chance discovery that she was abducted by a man with a white van, abused, killed and buried alongside previous child victims. But Lavery's tragedy, directed at the Cottesloe by Bill Alexander, is less concerned with telling the grisly tale than with exploring the complex and changing responses of its three characters.

Nancy, the dead child's mother, is speedily transformed from a houseproud, fed-up housewife in her first scene to the self-important chairperson of Flame, a support group for the families of missing children. (With cruel realism, she was particularly cross with Rhona on the day of her disappearance.) The shallow buzz that Nancy gets from speaking about her loss to large audiences neatly parallels the pleasure the glamorous American scientist Agnetha derives from the standing ovations that greet her lectures on the damaged physiology of serial killers. It's painfully obvious that, for unhappy and frozen women, celebrity and public acclaim are a - meagre - substitute for private happiness. Male murderousness implicitly reinforces their own sense of virtue. Nancy's vengeful wrath is scrutinised by Agnetha with inexhaustible, if contrived, tolerance.

Anita Dobson, as Nancy, is heartbreaking. Nancy's shrill self-righteousness and lack of charm contribute to the power of her anguish. The extent of her pain is suggested through perfectly timed pauses and silences, which left me practically howling by the interval. Almost as distressing as the horror of Rhona's death is the way it divides the survivors, rather than drawing them closer. Nancy hardly pauses to think about why her husband has left her, and in her own all-consuming grief fails to notice her surviving daughter's suffering, still less to consider whether she might have something to learn from the girl's very different way of dealing with the tragedy - through Tibetan Buddhism.

Josie Lawrence's Agnetha, with her emotional insecurity and selfish globe-trotting, is the perfect foil to the embittered Nancy. There is a particularly well-staged semi-comic scene in which she is sitting crossly on an aeroplane equipped with brandy glass and laptop.

Perhaps inevitably, the most fascinating character is the paedophile Ralph. We first see him washing his hands obsessively and smoothing on hand cream, a terrifically creepy touch. Performed with great concentration by Tom Georgeson, Ralph draws us deep into his solitary world whose "centre of operations" is a rented lock-up shed. There are flashes of egotistical charm as he displays the numerous tattoos that will eventually be his undoing, especially his naive pride in the one he has designed himself that shows "angels fighting with devils against a background of trees - O yes, O yes". Though the severe childhood damage that has probably formed him is never fully articulated, his tattoos, a macho form of self-harm, tell a more revealing story. But he certainly isn't going to expose these hidden scars to the do-gooding American psychologist.

Bryony Lavery believes that "theatre should be cathartic", and to my amazement this profoundly upsetting play is also strangely uplifting. There are some particularly moving touches in the closing dialogue between the two women.

Frozen was written for the Birmingham Rep in 1998, while Bill Alexander was artistic director. As in Shakespeare's day, the Midlands can generate superb and genuinely original playwriting. All those concerned in the London premiere deserve the highest plaudits.

Frozen is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), until 24 August

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