The Verdict is in
Posted on 1st December 2025
The Raconteur Theatre Company examines capital punishment by dramatizing the cases of five women hanged over a fifty-year period. Annie Marler’s text imagines all of the executions were presided over by Mr Pierrepont, the timespan involved explained away by an honorific that suggests the character represents both Albert and his father. Marler actually employs further licence in doing so, with Pierrepont standing in for fellow executioners Billington and Ellis in the earlier cases, but her play is not really concerned with historical accuracy. In The Long Drop, the executioner becomes confessor, something that would never have happened. By doing so, she deftly avoids the pitfalls of the standard bio-play, instead offering up something far more intriguing.
We consequently get a fascinating insight into four contrasting capital cases, demonstrating there’s no such thing as a typical murderer. Time has softened the impact of Annie Walters and Amelia Sach’s grotesque joint crimes, allowing Julia Knight and Sharn McDonald to give broad, almost comic performances. In sharp contrast, Christina Isgrove’s visceral portrayal of Edith Thompson is painful to watch. Almost certainly innocent, Thompson had to be drugged and then dragged to the gallows, and Isgrove conveys the horror of the condemned with rare authenticity. Erin Girling-Knight is utterly chilling as the Greek Cypriot Styllou Christofi, Marler’s text lending her the ability to articulate her twisted worldview in English. Rounding things off is perhaps Pierrepont’s best known client, with Oliver Knight investing in Ruth Ellis a coquettish charm, robustly flirting with her ill at ease executioner.
Annie Marler insists this is simply a play about women, but she does herself a disservice, as something far more artful is going on here. She certainly conveys, with admirable economy, a biography of each of these women, but it’s the imagined Pierrepont that lingers in the imagination. Richard Melchior brings a dignified, stoic calm to the character, a man that betrays flickers of doubt as, through the ages, the hanging of individuals seems to do nothing to dissuade those that follow. While I suspect her Pierrepont mirrors Marler’s own views, she wisely avoids lapsing into a didactic polemic, leaving the audience to decide for themselves the abiding message of this dense, involving play.