The Thrill of Love: Ruth Ellis – Beyond the Headlines
A glamorous blonde nightclub hostess. A tempestuous love affair. A shooting outside a Hampstead pub. And, just three months later, a walk to the gallows.
The story of Ruth Ellis has fascinated Britain for more than seventy years. But in The Thrill of Love, playwright Amanda Whittington is interested in something more complicated than the notorious crime that made Ellis famous.
She wants us to meet the woman before she became a headline.
Next week, our latest theatre trip takes us to the Robin Hood Theatre in Averham for this compelling drama about love, friendship, ambition and a woman whose life became entangled with some of the darker realities of 1950s Britain.
The woman behind the headlines
Even people who know little about Ruth Ellis may recognise the description attached to her ever since 1955: the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Ellis was 28 when she was executed at Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955 for the murder of her lover, racing driver David Blakely. The basic facts of the case were never seriously disputed. Ellis had shot Blakely outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead and admitted what she had done.
But the apparent simplicity of the crime concealed a far more complicated story.
Born Ruth Neilson in 1926, Ellis came from a troubled background and left school at 14. By her twenties she had entered the very particular world of post-war London nightlife, working as a model and nightclub hostess and eventually managing a club.
It was a world of champagne, expensive cars and wealthy customers, offering the tantalising possibility of glamour at a time when Britain was still emerging from wartime austerity. Ellis cultivated the image to match: platinum-blonde hair, fashionable clothes and the appearance of a woman determined to make something of herself.
Behind it, life was considerably less glamorous.
By the time she met Blakely in 1953, Ellis was already a mother and had left a deeply unhappy marriage. Her relationship with the younger racing driver became intense and increasingly destructive.
What happened between them, and how much the attitudes and laws of the 1950s failed to recognise what Ellis herself had endured, have kept the case controversial ever since.
A trial that lasted barely two days
Ellis's trial at the Old Bailey was remarkably swift.
The prosecution did not have to establish who had killed Blakely. Ellis had admitted it. Under cross-examination, she also gave a devastatingly straightforward answer when asked what she had intended when she fired the gun: she intended to kill him.
The jury took only minutes to find her guilty of murder.
At the time, a murder conviction carried a mandatory death sentence. Despite considerable public interest in the case and calls for clemency, the Home Secretary declined to grant a reprieve. Ellis was hanged only thirteen weeks after Blakely's death.
Her execution became part of the growing national debate about capital punishment. The National Archives describes the Ellis case as playing a major part in the movement towards abolition; executions for murder in Great Britain eventually ended in the 1960s.
Yet questions about Ellis did not disappear with her death.
Instead, they multiplied.
Looking at Ruth Ellis again
Later accounts revealed much more about the violence and turmoil surrounding Ellis's relationship with Blakely and raised questions about events immediately before the shooting.
Her case returned to the Court of Appeal in 2003, when her family sought to have the murder conviction replaced with manslaughter. The appeal was rejected: the judges concluded that she had been correctly convicted according to the law as it stood in 1955.
But society's understanding of domestic abuse, coercive control and their psychological consequences has changed enormously since Ellis stood in the dock.
That makes the latest chapter in her story particularly remarkable.
In July this year—more than 70 years after her execution—Ruth Ellis was granted a posthumous conditional pardon. The pardon does not erase the fact that she killed David Blakely or overturn her conviction, but it recognises circumstances surrounding the abuse she suffered which the criminal justice system of 1955 was poorly equipped to understand.
It gives Amanda Whittington's play an extraordinary contemporary resonance.
Amanda Whittington's The Thrill of Love
Whittington deliberately avoids turning Ellis's story into a conventional murder mystery.
We already know where history ends.
Instead, The Thrill of Love takes us into the smoky clubs and bars of 1950s London and asks us to look beyond the familiar image of the glamorous blonde murderess.
Whittington became fascinated by Ellis long before writing the play, after seeing Miranda Richardson portray her in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger. When she was later commissioned by the New Vic Theatre to write a play involving women and the criminal justice system, Ellis's story provided the subject she had been carrying with her for years.
Crucially, Whittington chose to tell much of the story through the women around Ruth.
There is Vickie Martin, a fellow nightclub hostess with dreams of becoming an actress, alongside Sylvia and Doris, characters through whom Whittington explores the friendships formed among women negotiating a world largely controlled by men. Detective Inspector Jack Gale provides another perspective, giving the play something of the atmosphere of a film-noir investigation.
And running through the play is the music of Billie Holiday.
It is an inspired choice. Holiday's songs belong perfectly to this world of smoky nightclubs, romance and disappointment, while adding another layer of melancholy to a story in which glamour repeatedly collides with reality. Whittington has described how hearing just a few bars of Holiday could immediately transport her to a Soho club in the 1950s.
More than a true-crime story
That is perhaps what makes The Thrill of Love particularly intriguing.
This isn't simply a reconstruction of a famous murder.
Whittington is interested in the women who inhabited London's post-war clubland: smart, ambitious young women trying to build exciting lives in a society that offered them far fewer choices than it appeared to.
The glamour is real, but so are the dangers beneath it.
The playwright has said that before Ellis became permanently fixed in the public imagination as "tragic Ruth Ellis", she belonged to a group of young women who were funny, confident and optimistic about their futures. The Thrill of Love attempts to give some of that life back to her.
The result combines true crime, social history and character drama with the heightened atmosphere of film noir.
When the play was first produced at the New Vic Theatre in 2013, before transferring to London's St James Theatre, critics particularly responded to that mixture. The Guardian praised its treatment of the complexities of female friendship, while other reviews highlighted its tension, sharp dialogue and refusal to reduce Ellis to the image created by the newspapers.
An atmospheric setting for the story
Our trip also takes us back to one of the area's most distinctive little theatres.
The Robin Hood Theatre at Averham was built in 1913 in the grounds of Averham Rectory. Originally known as the Robin Hood Opera House, its intimate auditorium, ornate proscenium arch and long theatrical history make it a particularly atmospheric setting for a play that depends so much upon drawing an audience into another world.
Robin Hood Theatre Company's production runs from 22–26 September, with evening performances at 7.30pm and a Saturday matinee.
For those of us going along next week, it should be a fascinating contrast to our other theatre trip, Till the Stars Come Down.
One gives us a contemporary Nottinghamshire wedding where the tensions within a family gradually force their way to the surface. The other takes us into the clubs and bars of 1950s London and asks us to reconsider a woman whom history reduced to a crime, a photograph and a place in the record books.
More than seventy years later, Ruth Ellis continues to raise uncomfortable questions about love, violence, justice and the way society judges women.
The Thrill of Love promises to explore those questions without losing sight of the complicated, ambitious and very human woman at the centre of them.
We’re looking forward to seeing Robin Hood Theatre Company bring her extraordinary story to the stage next week.
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