Iron
Rona Munro
Best Girl Productions
HOME, Manchester
September 15-19, 2026: 2 hrs 50 mins
(also at Hull Truck Theatre, September 23-24, and Dukes Lancaster, September 30-Oct 3)
Fay is in prison, sentenced to life for killing her husband with a kitchen knife. Josie, her daughter, was later brought up by her grandmother (whom she called “Mum”), and is now in a good job, seemingly enjoying her life. She finally visits her mother, after 15 years. She can remember nothing of her father or his death, though she was there as a child.
Rona Munro’s play Iron, from 2002, is an intensely fascinating exploration of how minds function, of the progress of rebuilding a mother-daughter relationship after such a tragedy – and of the cruelties and humiliating power dynamics (for both visitor and visited) of imprisonment. The two prison officers we meet – George and Sheila – are people, too: doing a job, but all too human in their own resentments and vulnerability.
Underneath it all is a nagging doubt about justice: the play makes us want to know what really happened all those years ago - just as Josie does, since Fay refused to defend herself in court, has been incarcerated indefinitely, as a danger to the public, and seems to want to keep it that way.
It’s a remarkable and brilliant piece of writing. Practically everything happens in (or just outside) the prison visiting room: mother and daughter seated either side of a table, not allowed to touch. There is one scene in Sam Holland-Bunyan’s production in which they appear free to stand and walk around as well, though I’m not sure what that is supposed to convey.
The play’s a bit on the long side at close on three hours, including the interval, but never loses audience engagement. Perhaps towards the end it could be slightly faster-paced, and maybe tries to tie up (or at least highlight) a few too many loose ends, but it unfolds unerringly to its high point and has its twist in the tail.
It is also acted superbly, by real-life mother and daughter Christine and Lois Mackie (playing alongside each other for the first time, and giving the first performance by a real mother and daughter). Jamie Smelt as George and Ellaney Hayden as Sheila, the prison guards, have personalities of their own (for good or ill) and hidden thoughts to reveal; one in his philosophising and attempts at detachment; the other in her subliminal desire to find a mother-substitute in the murderer she is guarding – both utterly convincing.
The simple set is by visual artist James Mackie (keeping things in the family, I think), and the production is immensely aided by Charlie Brown’s sound design, evoking crowded, echoing rooms, the coastal home of the one-time family, and underlining tensions and miseries.
If you have ever visited someone in prison, the atmosphere will be all too familiar. So will the experience of desperately wanting to ask the two questions: “Did you really, knowingly, do it?”; and “Why” – which for the inmate are probably unanswerable anyway. It’s still a thought-provoking work.
More info and tickets here
