REVIEW: The Thrill of Love, People's Theatre

A night of real-life noir

Emily Jeffrey (Doris) and Emma Robson (Ruth). Credit Paul Hood

If this sounds like a spring romance, don’t be fooled. The pursuit of love can be fraught with danger and thrills often come at a cost.

Poor Ruth Ellis paid the ultimate price, the last woman to be executed in this country – hanged at Holloway Prison on July 13, 1955.

Poor Ruth Ellis?

She did kill her lover, David Blakely, outside a London pub, also injuring a passer-by as she loosed off a wartime pistol.

And she owned up straight away, handing the weapon to an off-duty policeman who happened to be nearby.

At the Old Bailey she was condemned to death and then denied the last minute reprieve that several newspapers had confidently predicted and thousands of sympathisers had called for.

Ruth’s, then, was a short life (she was just 28 when she died) with a brutal ending.

Playwright Amanda Whittington casts a 21^st Century eye over the circumstances of her life and death, using the device of an independent-minded police detective, Inspector Gale (brilliantly played here by Steve Hewitt), to winkle out what we would call mitigating circumstances.

Steve Hewitt as Inspector Gale and Emma Robson as Ruth. Credit Paul Hood

“She’s resigned to her fate,” he says at one point in his low key way, “but I’m not.”

The Gale/Ellis thread runs through the play, he suspecting that another admirer supplied the loaded gun; she staying tight-lipped and refusing to share the burden of guilt.

In the intimate setting of the People’s Studio, spotlight and shadow evoke the seedy but seductive world Ruth inhabited. Recorded pistol shots – bam, bam, bam – recall the shocking crime.

Emma Robson shines quite literally, sporting the peroxide look favoured by Ruth and other blonde ‘bombshells’ dreaming of the Hollywood life of Diana Dors, UK answer to Marilyn Monroe.

But she shines, too, in conveying raw emotion. Ruth is plagued by insecurities as a young mother with a troubled past and an errant racing driver boyfriend she both loves and hates, or at least can’t forget.

Nor even condemn when he hits her – Gale sniffs out the truth – causing her to miscarry.

Much of the play’s action takes place in the club run by no-nonsense Sylvia (Moira Valentine) where young women make a living by entertaining ‘gentlemen’, pandering to their whims.

Ruth’s an old hand, newcomer Vickie (Hattie Easton) is brashly confident and bent on stardom, come what may.

There are moments of comedy here, all girls together. But it’s bitter-sweet.

Moira Valentine (Sylvia) and Emma Robson (Ruth). Credit Paul Hood

Vickie is based on another real-life character, Ruth’s friend Vickie Martin, fated to die in a head-on collision alongside her Indian maharaja boyfriend. We see the other women as mourners, gathered at the graveside.

Mention of Stephen Ward, implicated in the Profumo scandal some years later, adds shade to this after hours world of drinking and sex. (Ward is said to have met Christine Keeler in the club where Ruth and Vickie worked.)

Most of the play’s action concerns these women, the contrasting fourth being Emily Jeffrey’s Doris, a relative paragon of virtue who cleans for Sylvia and cleans up Ruth in her hour of need.

All are victims in some respects, striving to survive in a patriarchal world where PTSD, diminished responsibility and the like were not yet grounds for clemency or even understood.

There’s no happy ending. How could there be? (The ramifications of Ruth’s death rippled down the generations, although that’s beyond the scope of the play.)

But Tony Childs’s production for the People’s shows the company at its best, bringing drama to life in a way that grabs the attention and lingers in the mind.

It was another 10 years, incidentally, before the death penalty was abolished in the UK.

The Thrill of Love runs until Saturday, April 18. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.