🔗 Share this article

What could you do if your most reckless friend from your youth reappeared? What if you were dying of cancer and felt completely unburdened? Consider if you felt guilty for landing your friend in the clink a decade back? If you were the one she landed in the clink and your release was granted to succumb to illness in her care? What if you had been a almost unstoppable pair of con artists who still had a collection of costumes from your prime and a deep desire for one last thrill?

These questions and beyond form the core of Frauds, a new drama featuring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker, presents to viewers on a exhilarating, intense season-long journey that traces two female fraudsters determined to pulling off one last job. Echoing a recent project, Jones developed this series with a writing partner, and it retains similar qualities. Much like a suspense-driven structure was used as background to the psychodramas slowly revealed, here the elaborate theft the protagonist Roberta (Bert) has meticulously arranged in prison since her diagnosis is a means to explore an exploration of friendship, betrayal and love in all its forms.

Bert is placed under the supervision of Sam (Whittaker), who resides close by in the Spanish countryside. Guilt stopped her from ever visiting Bert, but she has stayed close and worked no cons without her – “Rather insensitive with you in prison for a job I botched.” And for her new, if brief, freedom, she has bought her plenty of new underwear, because there are many ways for female friends to offer contrition and a classic example is the purchase of “a big lady-bra” following ten years of uncomfortable institutional clothing.

Sam aims to continue leading her quiet life and care for Bert until her passing. Bert has other ideas. And when your daftest friend has other ideas – well, those tend to be the ones you follow. Their former relationship slowly resurfaces and her strategies are underway by the time she lays out the full blueprint for the heist. This show plays around with the timeline – to good rather than eye-rolling effect – to give us the set-pieces first and then the rationale. So we watch the pair stealing gems and timepieces off wealthy guests’ wrists at a funeral – and acquiring a gilded religious artifact because what’s to stop you if you could? – before ripping off their wigs and reversing their funeral attire to transform into vibrant outfits as they stride out and down the chapel stairs, filled with excitement and assets.

They require the stolen goods to finance the operation. This entails hiring a document expert (with, unbeknown to them, a betting addiction that is due to attract unneeded scrutiny) in the form of magician’s assistant Jackie (Elizabeth Berrington), who has the technical know-how to assist in swapping the target painting (a famous surrealist piece at a major museum). Additionally, they recruit art enthusiast Celine (Kate Fleetwood), who specialises in works by male artists exploiting women. She is equally merciless as all the criminals their accomplice and the funeral theft are attracting, including – most perilously of all – their old boss Miss Take (Talisa Garcia), a modern-day Fagin who had them running scams for her since their youth. She reacted poorly to the pair’s assertion of themselves as independent conwomen so unresolved issues remain in that area.

Unexpected developments are layered between progressively uncovered truths about the duo’s past, so you get all the satisfactions of a sophisticated heist tale – executed with no shortage of brio and admirable willingness to overlook obvious implausibilities – alongside a captivatingly detailed portrait of a friendship that is possibly as toxic as her illness but just as impossible to uproot. Jones gives perhaps her finest and multifaceted portrayal yet, as the damaged, resentful Bert with her endless quest for thrills to distract from the gnawing pain within that is unrelated to metastasising cells. Whittaker supports her, doing brilliant work in a slightly less interesting part, and together with the writers they create a incredibly chic, deeply moving and profoundly intelligent work of art that is feminist to its bones without preaching and an absolute success. More again, soon, please.