Lucy Boynton and Toby Jones’s outstanding performances meet beautifully claustrophobic cinematography in this tale of a young mother sentenced to death for killing her violent lover

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.