Iron

Fay is fifteen years into a life sentence for murdering her husband. Her grown-up daughter Josie visits her for the first time, and the two women begin to build a relationship

But an attempt by Josie to smuggle in some tranquillisers results in a three month ban on visits which threatens to destroy the fragile rapprochement

'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?' - Daily Telegraph

'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' - Guardian