Iron review – a real-life mother and daughter add extra dimension to prison drama

You can see why they cast real-life mother and daughter Christine and Lois Mackie in the central roles of Rona Munro’s 2002 prison drama. With Christine playing Fay, a lifer who is inside for murder, and Lois as Josie, her daughter and only visitor, it is no stretch to believe they are related.

The irony, though, in this probing, slippery play, is not just that they are estranged but they have become quite unlike each other. It has been 15 years since Josie saw her mother and, having been raised by a grandmother, has grown into a sensible career woman, all suits, business parties and international travel.

Mackie junior plays her with an air of detachment: you can imagine her drifting frictionlessly through the world of personnel just as you can see her struggling for definition in her private life. Whatever happened in her childhood has stripped her of an identity. She comes to the visiting room to be coloured in.

Compared with such middle-class smoothness, Fay is all sharp edges. Mackie senior plays her like a captive bird, her eyes forever searching for danger, her body contained but ready for flight. It is a superb performance, inconsolable one moment, manipulative the next, hungry for trust but untrustable. Is her “erratic impulse control” a consequence of being locked up or a character flaw? She leaves us guessing.

As they meet, month by month, they only seem less alike. That is part of Munro’s point: in other circumstances, someone like Josie could forget that people like Fay exist, still less consider the purpose of prison, its effects on mental health and the degree to which women, in particular, can be incarcerated less because of malice than because of a bad roll of the dice. Whether Fay is guilty or innocent, the women’s trauma starts with a man.

Sam Holland-Bunyan’s bare-bones production for Best Girl is quiet and subdued, the better to untangle the psychological knots in the women’s relationship as they are watched over by the seen-it-all prison guards (Ellaney Hayden and Jamie Smelt). The low-key approach mutes Munro’s humour and makes a long play seem longer, even as it renders a fractured relationship compelling and sad.

• At Home, Manchester, until 19 September. Then at The Dukes, Lancaster, 30 September–3 October.