Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The pains of confinement inside women’s prisons have long been a source of dramatic intrigue, sometimes of the exploitative variety. Rona Munro’s play is no Prisoner: Cell Block H, however. Rather, Munro’s exploration of what happens when one inmate’s life sentence is interrupted by visits from the daughter she hasn’t seen for fifteen years is a tense and complex affair. First seen at the Traverse in 2002 and revived here by director Richard Baron for the Borders-based Firebrand company in association with the Heart of Hawick, Iron is a battle of wills between Fay, who stabbed her husband to death, and Josie, the daughter Fay never saw growing up. While Fay has been made brittle and manipulative by institutionalisation, Josie only wants to know what life used to be like, when she still had a dad. Baron’s brooding production is led by Blythe Duff, who plays Fay with a flint-eyed concentration and complete lack of sentimentality. As Josie, Irene Allan flits between amateur psychology, trying to impress her and out and out sparring. There are moments when Fay and Josie’s increasingly fraught exchanges could be the cut and thrust of most mother-daughter spats. Only the two prison guards, one male, one female, watching over them like uniformed hawks reminds you that all the talk about ear-rings and boys is taking place behind bars. Fay’s relationships with guards Sheila and George are in some ways more important than her one with Josie. Claire Dargo’s Sheila in particular shares a tense intimacy with Fay that Josie will never have. In the end, the emotional lockdown Fay sentences herself to is the only option in Munro’s brutal study of life behind bars. The Herald, November 8th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Comments