Iron by Rona Monro - Review of production by Richmond Shakespeare Society

Rona Monro's uncompromising 2002 play examines the reconciliation of a long-estranged daughter with her imprisoned mother, fifteen years into a life sentence for killing the girl’s father. 

Acclaimed at its premier as a brilliant fusion of abstract and narrative purpose, the play is a provocative reflection on memory, identity and family; and a frank account of an uncommon but very human domestic tragedy.  While the mother-daughter relationship between Fay and Josie provides the heart of the drama, the play explores the dichotomy facing prison staff charged with the twin remit of providing both care and discipline to challenging vulnerable adults.

Mark Turnbull's sensitive production uses a minimalist set and back projections to convey the hectic unwashed whiteness of the institution in which mother Fay is expecting to spend her life.  Live video is incorporated to emphasize the sense of voyeuristic intrusion. 

The play opens with daughter Josie’s unplanned arrival at the prison.  Her life is in flux and there is a hint of crisis: she has a multiply fractured childhood, and now appears stalled between crisscrossing lines of divorce, shifting employment and self-imposed exile.

While the production doesn’t quite nail the opening tension between the two women, subsequent scenes more than make up for it, as both principles grow before our eyes, remaking their relationship and their history through a series of visiting room encounters.  Under the flawed tutelage of her mother Josie flowers into revolutionary emotional and social articulacy.  Events culminate in an illicit package passed over the visiting room table, and Fay is put on a three month punishment regime from which she will slide into despair and self-starvation.

The drama capitalizes on the duality with which the skills of prisoners are perceived: a woman with sophisticated social abilities in the normal world becomes an agent of malevolent conditioning in prison.  This is conveyed with clarity through the two officers’ own relationships with Fay, and their efforts to persuade Josie that what she takes for maternal engagement is actually cold calculation.

Maxina Cornwell’s performance as Fay is excellent, detailed, honest and fully rounded.  I felt she might have brought a little more ambiguity to the role but in the given terms it is a very strong performance indeed.

Bonnie Allen as Josie gives a crisp, precise performance, and conveys an impressive sense of growth.  The role is elusive and Bonnie achieves a high level of balanced control with it.

David Waltham-Hier as Guard 1 is an utterly convincing prison officer with a gentle assertive delivery that belies his eventual humiliation of Fay.

Nerys Sara Williams as Guard 2 is also entirely credible, and finds an edge of frighteningly familiar inhumanity as her cool fascination with Fay slips into cruelty.

I sincerely hope Mark and his team will feel that the challenge of such a difficult play for its performers and its audiences has been worth while.  Non-professional clubs are not renowned for their willingness to program risky work. Before it is virtually anything else, theatre is vibrant social response; however amateur dramatics often seems to prefer celebrating safer glories to investigating new challenge.  Congratulations to all concerned.