Josie and her mother Fay have not met for 15 years. Josie is now 25, and successful at work, but her emotional life is all out of kilter. Fay has lived for 15 years in prison, seeing the sun only when she lies on the floor of her cell. Now mother and daughter are reunited. Josie, who can remember nothing of her life before the age of 11, wants her mother's memories of the years before Fay stuck a knife in Josie's father's chest. But what does Fay want from Josie?
Rona Munro's quietly impressive play seems simple enough on the surface, but, like her characters, it has hidden depths. It is a love story about how women love men unwisely and too well, and about the painful, twisted, sacred love between mothers and daughters. There is something of Josie and Fay in almost every mother-and-daughter relationship.
Munro's play is very canny. It sets you off on one journey, and, just when you feel confident about where you are going, changes direction. It is no simple prison drama. It is not a thriller, or a feminist tract on the inequalities of the justice system. Nor is it about the many brutal absurdities of the prison system. It touches on all these things, but, more than that, it is about the things that make us human, the things that scorch us, how men and women love differently, how terrifyingly easy it is to kill the thing you love, and the encroachments on life and liberty that make the soul seize up and turn to iron.
Roxana Silbert's production is exquisitely judged, almost torturous as it ratchets up the tension in the psychological games between mother and daughter. It is also beautifully acted. Ged McKenna and Helen Lomax make much of the hard job of being the prison guards, whose apparently ordinary lives provide a counterpoint to the central tragedy. Louise Ludgate is excellent as Josie, very much the little girl lost under her smart suit, and Sandy McDade is outstanding as Fay, a woman whose real punishment is living every day with the knowledge of what she threw away in a moment of rage.
· Until August 24. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
