Pain and forgiveness

Last year's Edinburgh Fringe was memorable mostly for the blaze of new Scottish writing coming out of the Traverse Theatre.
David Greig's Outlying Islands and Anthony Neilson's Stitching have already made their way here. Now comes Rona Munro's Iron, a devastating drama about a woman serving life for murder that frequently reduced Edinburgh audiences to tears.

Aberdeen-based Munro, in London to publicise the play, is trying to work out whether she always writes about women and violence, or if it just seems that way.

Bold Girls, one of only two other plays performed in London, was about women in Northern Ireland whose husbands were victims, in different ways, of the Troubles. 'Bold Girls was ultimately more about women living without men,' she says. (As, in a very real sense, is Iron.) 'But I've certainly visited abused women and female violence a fair amount in my work.'

In Iron, a daughter visiting her imprisoned mother for the first time in 15 years needs to know why her father died in order to live her own life. Her mother, however - who killed him one night with a kitchen knife - is refusing to provide easy answers.

'I specifically wanted to write about a woman who has committed murder,' says Munro. 'But I also wanted that act to be ambiguous. There's very little voice given to the psychology of a particular form of female violence, the women who are unquestionably guilty.'

Perhaps because instances of women committing such extreme acts are so rare. In the course of researching Iron, Munro spoke to several women inmates but was astonished to learn that very few are serving life for murder.

'There are perhaps about half a dozen in all of Scotland,' she says. (Across the UK, figures are higher, but not by much, at about 150.) 'It's odd, because it's such a cultural stereotype: the femme fatale, the vengeful woman. But it hardly ever happens.'

That doesn't make the subject any less compelling. In person, Munro is small, charming, shy and chatty. It comes as a surprise when it transpires that in writing the play she became plagued by thoughts of, 'There but for the grace of God go I'.

'I wondered constantly whether anyone could kill someone if they were driven enough to it, or whether only a certain kind of person could,' she says. 'Certainly I've felt that kind of anger in my own time. I think the play asks that question, but I don't think it answers it.'

Munro didn't set out to write a covert criticism of the prison system, but she ended up writing one anyway. 'Half the women I spoke to weren't sure whether they were in prison to be punished or to be rehabilitated,' she says.