In Gary Fleder’s 1997 thriller Kiss the Girls, Morgan Freeman delivers a line that has stayed with me ever since.

Freeman plays forensic psychologist Alex Cross while Ashley Judd is Kate McTiernan. The latter has escaped a killer who calls himself Casanova. When McTiernan tells Cross that “he sounded so sincere” when he told her he loved her, Cross replies: “Multiply your anger by about a hundred, Kate. That’s how much he thinks he loves you.”

Who ever knows if they are loving in the right way? Who knows whether what they remember as kindness was ever really that? These thoughts, and the idea that passion is not simply the privilege of a good heart, resonated throughout Best Girl Productions’ staging of Rona Munro’s Iron, directed by Sam Holland-Bunyan.

First performed in 2002, Iron centres on Josie (Lois Mackie) reconnecting with her mother Fay (Christine Mackie), who is serving a life sentence for murdering Josie’s father. Josie has been abroad and returns after years apart. At first, the reunion is tentative but, gradually, they begin to build something. Josie wants her memories back. Fay wants, in part, to live vicariously through Josie.

But that isn’t a big enough description of what this play is.

Prison officers George (Jamie Smelt) and Sheila (Ellaney Hayden) are far more than figures circling the central relationship. They remind us that human nature is a vast terrain and, if you work or live in a prison for long enough, you begin to map out its destinations. Both know Fay and bring their own understanding of family, punishment and blurred boundaries.

Christine Mackie and Lois Mackie play Fay and Josie with a powerful dynamic. They are accomplished performers, but there is another layer: they are mother and daughter in real life, sharing the stage together for the first time. It gives certain moments an almost unbearable charge.

This is a fierce piece. Fierce is the right word.

At first, feelings are held like wild animals in a trap. Once released, both women seem magnetised towards each other by what they need. Fay needs an outlet for everything she misses – dancing, drinking, loving, the dopamine hit she craves, and, failing that, chocolate and cigarettes. Most of all, she wants access to a life beyond the prison walls, and Josie becomes a way of experiencing it.

Josie needs something different. She needs to know that her childhood contained comfort and good times, to recover something of who she was before her father died and her mother disappeared into prison. As Fay gives some of that past back, Josie begins to see a mother rather than a murderer. Around them, George and Sheila watch with the knowledge accumulated from years of knowing Fay and working inside an institution where affection, trust, manipulation and survival can become almost impossible to separate.

Holland-Bunyan’s production understands that Munro’s writing is strongest when those uncertainties remain uncertain. Nobody is easily explained and nobody belongs comfortably in one moral category. It is emotionally charged for the audience as much as for the characters. You can feel the silence in the auditorium weighing heavily because nobody wants to miss a moment. Mother and daughter, prison officers and, eventually, the audience become hyper-focused on where this relationship is heading.

The final half-hour of Iron is so well written, and so well performed by all four actors, that I felt grateful. Grateful to Munro for writing it and grateful to this company for allowing us to experience it with them.

Given the opportunity, I would go again. Knowing how it unfolds, I’d like to repeat the experience of meeting characters that we feel very differently about by the end.

By Cathy Crabb

Main image by Shay Rowan for Iron by Rona Munro, presented by Best Girl Productions

 

Iron is at HOME, Manchester until September 19, 2026, before moving to Hull Truck Theatre on September 23 and 24, 2026, and then The Dukes in Lancaster from September 30 to October 3, 2026.