Ruth Ellis’s grim and inevitable fate
The story of Ruth Ellis and of her execution is well known.
Well known stories carry their own problems when it comes to holding an audience.
Especially when it comes to the story of the last woman in Britain to go to the gallows.
It is difficult to sustain a true-crime drama when you know what happens at the end.
Director Fidelma Meaney works hard to bring us behind the grim scenario to the real story behind the execution of Ruth Ellis.
Sadly, there is no hope of reprieve or sense of redemption.
Instead we become part of the gathering inevitability of what unfolds in the grisly finale.
The facts are well known.
Ruth Ellis shot and murdered her lover David Blakely outside a London pub and was rewarded with a trip to the gallows.
Blakely was an abusive, violent, manipulative thug.
Ellis had a miscarriage 10 days before the shooting after Blakely, the father, punched her in the stomach.
He stole everything she owned and destroyed her career as a gentleman’s club manageress.
Sadly, all this was deemed irrelevant by the judge that hanged her.
The trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers refused to allow the defence of provocation to go to the jury.
Under current law, murder can be reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of either provocation or diminished responsibility.
However, provocation was strictly interpreted at the time.
The diminished responsibility defence was enacted only in 1957 – four years after the Ellis hanging – as a direct result of Ellis's case.
Playwright, Amanda Whittington’s uncompromising script doesn’t spare Ellis.
And Róisín Briggs’s strong performance is a warts-and-all account that leaves the audience wanting to shake Ruth out of her deluded love affair with a bully.
It’s a credit to Róisín’s acting skills that she manages to elicit sympathy for a woman that’s hard to like.
Ruth’s life and work lay on the boundary of what was legally acceptable in post-war Britain where rationing and want was everywhere.
Like everything else in this story, the image of the wannabee-Marilyn in paroxide wig and satin underwear, is no more than a mirage as she comes to London in search of a life beyond poverty.
The clever offstage staccato pulse of cameras throughout becomes a sharp reminder of intrusive reality beyond the lens.
Thousands of girls shared in the West End dream.
Like Ruth’s friend Vicki – the excellent Claire O’Halloran – who dreams of fast cars and bright lights and returning in a Rolls Royce.
The play is not without its heroines, of sorts.
Club manageress Sylvia (tough-talking Carol Elstead Thomas) gives Ruth blunt and brutal advice on the ways of London clubland but just doesn’t get through to her.
Julie Debois is delightful as the kindly charlady whose touching sincerity and charity makes her a firm favourite with tonight’s audience.
Tom Rogers’s, Inspector Gale works hard at dragging the facts from Ruth as she waits in her prison cell to he executed.
His work is largely in vain as she refuses – until it’s too late – to reveal the identity of the man who gave her the oiled and loaded gun, who was clearly complicit in the murder.
There is a timeliness about this production.
In the year of the 70th anniversary of the execution, women are still victims of worldwide violence.
Whittington’s script doesn’t shy away from the complexities of female relationships.
Warmth is tepid, sympathy is scant and bitterness is never far away as these sundown women always end up losers in a man’s world.
A 2003 appeal to the Court of Appeal in 2003 ruled: “that Ellis was properly convicted of murder according to the laws at the time of her trial”.
Her hair turned white with fear on the night before her execution. On the day Ruth Ellis was hanged, a woman in Malta was sentenced for the very same crime.
She got six months.
