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Frozen Love: A Buckingham Nicks Story

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 3 Published: 4 Aug 2025 theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall Show Dates: 1 Aug 2025-16 Aug 2025

Fleetwood Mac are a band that will not go away. After 50 years, their songs still haunt the charts, TikTok and the minds of millions. A key reason for this enduring success is that their music documents personal upheavals between band members – most famously the tempestuous relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

Most impressive is how the play shows the couple’s ambition as both a superpower and a curse

This play is their origin story, leading up to their recruitment to the band. Written and performed by Georgie Banks and Jake Byrom, and using material from published interviews with Nicks and Buckingham, it’s an inspired idea. The period it covers includes the recording of their commercially unsuccessful album Buckingham Nicks, which, in the great tradition of Fleetwood Mac, documents their mutual love and loathing.

The talent of Banks and Byrom shines throughout. The musical virtuosity of Nicks and Buckingham is a tough yardstick, but the performers’ singing and guitar playing is excellent.

The play is constructed with real flair. Unlike many musician biopics, where incidents feel clumsily created to insert songs, here the songs and action fit together naturally – even inevitably.

Most impressive is how the play shows the couple’s ambition as both a superpower and a curse. It drives them apart yet chains them together. Buckingham’s ambition – and related selfishness – is intolerable, yet gets things done. Nicks holds down three jobs while still finding time to record. Whenever she is broken and defeated, her first response is to sit down and write a song.

They must split up, but need each other for their music. At the finale, Buckingham risks his own ambitions to help Nicks – but is this selflessness, or just another kind of selfishness?

Despite some wavering accents and underdeveloped dramatic impact in a few scenes, this is a strong recommendation for fans of Fleetwood Mac – or of cursed relationships.

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Frozen Love: A Buckingham Nicks Story, is the true story of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s rocky road to joining Fleetwood Mac. The creators of the piece, Georgie Banks and Jake Byrom, intertwine songs from Stevie and Lindsey’s scarcely-known debut duo album Buckingham Nicks and also show how some of the world’s favourite Fleetwood Mac songs came about. Their relationship during their time with Fleetwood Mac is infamous, but before that performance of Silver Springs, at the heart of it, they were madly in love and would do whatever it took for the music.