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10 hours ago
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For obvious reasons, the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged by the state, has been told and retold in many different versions over the years, in film, theatre, radio and, of course, television. In A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, Lucy Boynton brings it to the small screen once again, playing the woman sentenced to death for shooting her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, north-west London. It is a sad and complex story, and while the performances are excellent, this solid four-parter can only march them grimly towards their inevitable conclusion.
It begins on the day of Ellis’s execution, in 1955, as she refuses an offer of drugs to “calm” her. It skips back several months to the night of her arrest – the night of the shooting – and then back again a few years, to where it all began for the purposes of this interpretation. Ellis, who was just 28 when she was hanged, is being interviewed for a job as the manager of a high-end(ish) London nightclub. The proprietor asks her to prioritise the final seat left vacant in the establishment: should it go to the aristocrat, the businessman or the actor? Boynton delivers the first of many wonderfully theatrical monologues in reply, establishing the framework of a fragile and shifting class system in postwar Britain.
Here is where A Cruel Love is most effective. Ellis has adopted a cut-glass accent, but she wears it like a costume. She has become, as she likes to remind people, the manageress of the nightclub, but she is also a sex worker under the thumb of her grotesque boss and landlord. She is presented as street smart, tough and eloquent, but is clearly vulnerable as the single mother of two small children. When she meets racing driver Blakely (Laurie Davidson), she is drawn into his wealthier world, and that of his friends, the Findlaters, “those malicious snobs” who look down on Ellis. Blakely and Ellis begin a toxic and violent relationship. His friends only see sport in his relentless philandering and appear to encourage his growing cruelty towards Ellis.
Ellis is a perpetual outsider. In court, she must attempt to convince a jury of 12 men that she is not a bad mother, not immoral, that there were mitigating circumstances (the concept of diminished responsibility came into law two years after Ellis’s execution, we are told, in a telling note at the very end) and that Blakely was abusive. There is a claustrophobia to the cinematography, which is simultaneously beautiful and suffocatingly close. The camera does not shy away from Blakely’s acts of violence, and I wonder if it lingers on them a touch too long.
The performances, though, are outstanding. Boynton really is fantastic as Ellis, driven to breaking point by the awful obsessions of privileged men, who are, ironically, the only ones who might be able to save her life in the end. Toby Jones is predictably great as her conflicted lawyer John Bickford, who seems entirely out of his depth with a woman who readily admits her guilt – “I took David’s life. I don’t expect you to save mine” – while she is silently pleading for an empathy that seems out of reach for almost everyone. A Cruel Love is as well acted as it is handsome. The supporting cast is so strong that actors like Juliet Stevenson and Nigel Havers just drop in, briefly. Havers plays his real-life grandfather Justice Havers, the judge who sentenced Ellis to death.
It is not always the case, but it can be difficult to sustain a true-crime drama when you know what happens at the end. Here, there is no hope of a reprieve, only a smouldering sense of impending doom. It pours in from all sides. Ellis has another man in her life, Desmond Cussen (a wonderfully slippery Mark Stanley), who is obsessive and sinister; his role in the murder went ignored and unpunished. Bickford cannot – and later will not – deliver what Ellis needs in order for her to live. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ruth, make these people understand what you’ve been through,” he tells her, in a moment of exasperation.
At times, A Cruel Love seems similarly hamstrung and never quite feels as if it gets to know Ellis. Perhaps that is the point. There are no clean lines. As she famously said after her arrest: “I am guilty. I am rather confused.” It picks up pace towards the end and the final episode is much more cohesive, laying out Ellis’s account, Cussens’ involvement and the many stages at which her death sentence might have been commuted. But it wades through a lot of murk before it gets there.
