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
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
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