Follow Me

On a black stage against a black curtain, there are two tables and two chairs, two bottles of beer, and two characters: Ruth Ellis, sentenced to be “hanged by the neck until you are dead”, and the man who is responsible for doing it, Albert Pierrepoint, Her Majesty's Chief Executioner.

The play, which takes place over the twenty-four hours leading up to the execution, is structured as a series of one-sided dialogues in which the audience assumes the role of dumb interlocutor. Pierrepoint instructs staff at Holloway Prison, sharing his top tips on execution technique; Ellis, fiddling nervously with a jigsaw, repeats the salient details of the case to her lawyer Mr Bickford, and then recites a few letters.

Pierrepoint has the air of a chummy publican moonlighting as executioner, and proves to be a surprisingly affable and engaging prescence, although he is played with a little too much working-class bluster and good cheer by Ross Gurney-Randall. Beth Fitzgerald's Ruth Ellis is a gaunt and haggard figure, who stares through her gem-studded spectacles with preamturely dead eyes. Fitzgerald is suitably disturbed in the role, a perfect antidote to Pierrepoint's frighteningly warm Yorkshireman in a play which offers few highlights but many small pleasures.

In contrasting ways, they form a morbid pair, dominated by their dealings with death, but the atmosphere of dread and remorse is punctuated by flashes of wit. Ellis initially appears blasé about her encroaching fate, before relishing its potential for verbal play. “I'd kill for a cigarette”, she says at one point. Viewers may find the tension leaves them with a similar craving for relief.