Femme fatale: Faye Castelow as Ruth Ellis
Faye Castelow gives a full-blooded, gin-swigging, brittle-boned performance as Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be sent to the gallows.Ellis hanged in 1955, when the Establishment still felt able to ignore protests about the death penalty.
Watching Amanda Whittington’s pungent play, one reflects that 58 years later the Home Office cannot even deport a terrorist sympathiser without hitting a ‘human rights’ snag.
The story begins with gunshots. Ellis admitted she had killed one of her lovers, David Blakely, but she pleaded ‘not guilty’ to murder. Police Inspector Jack Gale (Robert Gwilym, doing a lot of smoking under a trilby) wants to discover why she shot him and who gave her the gun.
Much of the play is in flashback to Ellis’s life working in ‘gentlemen’s’ nightclubs. James Dacre’s handsome production catches the false glamour of that world by lining the back wall with ruched red cinema curtains of old.
Add crooners’ microphones, red carpet, a trolley full of booze and white cross-lighting, which cuts through the smoke, and you have the dissolute, ‘sophisticated’ flavour of the clubs where Ellis was a hostess in smog-era London.
The shooting was on April 10, 1955 — my parents’ first wedding anniversary, as it happens. We cannot generalise about Fifties values because the drunkenness and unhappiness shown here are a world away from the self-discipline and love shown by plenty of others at that time.
Yet there is power in the play’s depiction of Ellis as a woman at the end of her tether, not entirely to blame. Ellis ties a headscarf (very League Of Gentlemen!) round her soon-to-snap neck. She wears Mary Whitehouse glasses. She refines her voice. Yet she lived on the very edge.
Hilary Tones goes through the motions slightly as nightclub madam Sylvia. Katie West makes a kindly charwoman, Doris, though her voice pipes. Maya Wasovicz catches the eye as Ellis’s glamorous friend Vickie.
But the night belongs to Miss Castelow as she hurls herself into Ellis’s agonies, vanities, stoicism and astonishing boozing. If she had not been sent to hangman Pierrepoint, she would surely have succumbed to cirrhosis.