Iron ( Archived )

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Pictured (L to R): Sandy McDade, Helen Lomax, Louise Ludgate; Sandy McDade, Louise Ludgate; Helen Lomax, Ged McKenna.

Director: Roxana Silbert; Design: Anthony MacIlwaine, Associate/Costume Design: Alex Eales, Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan, Sound: Matt MacKenzie. Cast: Helen Lomax, Louise Ludgate, Sandy McDade, Ged McKenna.

Fay is serving a life sentence for murdering her husband with a kitchen knife. Her daughter Josie, who was 11 at the time and who has not seen her mother for 15 years, decides one day to visit. That, her subsequent visits, and the relationship between mother and daughter that develops within the pressurised environment of a room under constant surveillance, is the subject of Rona Munros new play, transferring to London from Edinburgh where it premiered last year.

Munros writing is a precise as a scalpel as Josie and Fay tentatively start to find in each other something of the life theyve lost. Brilliantly, Munro taps into the audiences conditioned desire for the reasons behind what happened while mounting a compassionate defence of the psychology behind a particular – and rare – form of female violence.

METRO 5 stars

Rona Munros play deserves the plaudits it received at the Edinburgh Traverse last July. Emotionally honest and socially resonant, it transcends the melodramatic clinches of prison drama to explore the relationship between a mother and daughter and the corrosive nature of the penal system.

The mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of the pay, and Munro shows the two women opening up to each other: the globetrotting Josie slowly admits to her social unease and dysfunctional relationships, while Fay acknowledges her rackety past and yearning for lost sensory delights such as eating hot chips out of paper. You see a bond forged, but are aware that Josies monomaniac zeal will come up against Fays immutable sense of guilt.

What makes this a very good play is the way it sees an intimate human drama in the wider context of crime and punishment. Munro introduces us to a male and female guard every bit as institutionalised as their wards and, while offering no alternative, she raises crucial questions about our lock-em-up ethos.

The acting and production are as observant as the writing. Sandy McDade as Fay gives as good a performance as you will find in London. Tall and stork-like, she shows how Fays initially jerky movements acquire greater fluency as she becomes used to her daughter, and conveys the desolation of a woman who remembers the happiness she has lost through a moment of madness. Louise Ludgate as the trim, uptight Josie artfully suggests a woman confined to her own emotional solitude, while Ged McKenna and Helen Lomax keep you fascinated by the complex lives of the guards. Roxana Silberts immaculate direction avoids false pathos and Anthony MacIlwaines design underlines Munros point about the dangerous self-sufficiency of a prison system into which visitors intrude at their peril.

THE GUARDIAN 4 stars

If your feelings get too strong, be sure you dont have a kitchen knife in your hand. Thats the advice Sandy McDades Fay wryly gives to the 25-year-old daughter she hasnt seen for 15 years – and she should know, since shes spent that time in prison for murdering her husband and, since shes still considered erratic and impetuous, isnt likely to be let out just yet.

That particular line comes early in Rona Munros excellent Iron and it italicises a question that isnt answered until the very end of the evening. Why did Fay kill a man she clearly still loved and still misses? Was wife-abuse the explanation? Thats increasingly the view of Louise Ludgates Josie as she eagerly, hungrily, interrupts a yuppie career in hopes of recovering her mother and her own lost childhood memories; but, as often in Iron, the truth is less scrutible.

Munro sustains the tension by withholding information about the murder while using the play to investigate her characters and their needs.

Quickly we realise Fay wants to live vicariously through her daughters clothes, men, make-up, nightclubbing. Soon we twig that Josie is almost as lonely and trapped as her, this time in the prison of frustration and obsession. The grey doors, stairs and bars of Anthony MacIlwaines visiting-room set enclose them both.

But what makes the play teasing as well as gripping is that Munro just wont let us make definitive judgments. Is Fay misunderstood, self-sacrificial, even noble, as Josie wants to believe? Or is she a devious, manipulative egoist, as Helen Lomaxs cruel-seeming prison guard thinks? Whats right and whats wrong with Fay – and with a prison system that Munro criticises obliquely, through the mouth of an older, male guard, Ged McKennas ruefully fatalistic George?

Munro never succumbs to the obvious temptations. Her play isnt sensational, sentimental or preachy. On the contrary, Roxana Silberts production convinced me that Iron combines a documentary accuracy with a sense of human mystery.

And if you want capsule proof, observe the central performance. In a wonderfully exact, unforced, alive performance McDade shows you whats institutionalised and whats desperate in Fay. Now twisting, now hunched in that visiting-room chair, you see haunted regret, an odd innocence, a capacity for love, but also the embers of a destructive fury which once flamed and raged. If McDade isnt a major actress, well, Ive never encountered one.

THE TIMES 4 stars

IRON reviews from Edinburgh 2002

‘Josie and her mother Fay have not met for 15 years. Josie is now 25, and successful at work, but her emotional life is all out of kilter. Fay has lived for 15 years in prison, seeing the sun only when she lies on the floor of her cell. Now mother and daughter are reunited. Josie, who can remember nothing of her life before the age of 11, wants her mother’s memories of the years before Fay stuck a knife in Josie’s father’s chest. But what does Fay want from Josie?

‘Rona Munro’s quietly impressive play seems simple enough on the surface, but, like her characters, it has hidden depths. It is a love story about how women love men unwisely and too well, and about the painful twisted, sacred love between mothers and daughters. There is something of Josie and Fay in almost every mother-and-daughter relationship.

‘Munro’s play is very canny. It sets you off on one journey, and, just when you feel confident about where you are going, changes direction. It is no simple prison drama. It is not a thriller, or a feminist tract on the inequalities of the justice system. Nor is it about the many brutal absurdities of the prison system. It touches on all these things, but, more than that, it its about the things that make us human, the things that scorch us, how men and women love differently, how terrifyingly easy it is to kill the things you love, and the encroachments of life and liberty that make the soul seize up and turn to iron.

‘Roxana Silbert’s production is exquisitely judged, almost torturous as it ratchets up the tension in the psychological games between mother and daughter. It is also beautifully acted. Ged McKenna and Helen Lomax make much of the hard job of being the prison guards, whose apparently ordinary lives provide a counterpoint to the central tragedy. Louise Ludgate is excellent as Josie, very much the little girl lost under her smart suit, and Sandy McDade is outstanding as Fay, a woman whose real punishment is living every day with the knowledge of what she threw away in a moment of rage.

THE GUARDIAN

‘Iron, an exceptionally gripping and deeply moving play about a young woman who visits her mother in prison for the first time, 15 years after she was jailed for murder.

‘This is psychological drama at its best – tense, harrowing, yet also powered by an unsentimental fund of compassion. In its later stages, sniffs and sobs of emotion could be heard among the audience.

‘Munro never sounds a false note in the tense dialogue between mother and daughter, in which so much remains unsaid for so long. She also keeps the audience on tenterhooks without seeming to cynically manipulate us. Like the daughter, we become increasingly desperate to know the circumstances in which Fay stabbed her husband to death with a kitchen knife. She persuades us that she loved him. Why, then, did she kill him?

‘This is a play about devastating damage, and the way human beings cope with the unbearable. For Josie, the 25-year-old daughter, the answer has been to forget almost everything about her life, up to and including the moment when she discovered her father’s body. Louise Ludgate is outstanding in the role, as memories flood back and she begins to develop a dangerous emotional dependence on the mother she hasn’t seen since she was 10.

‘Sandy McDade is better still as Fay, desperately lean and nervy, sometimes alarmingly manipulative, racked by what she has done and coarsened by the deprivations of prison life. It’s a shatteringly powerful play, and Roxana Silbert’s production never relaxes its grip for a moment.’

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