Frauds review – Suranne Jones gives her best ever performanc...

What would you do if your most reckless friend from your teenage years got back in touch? What if you were dying of cancer and had nothing to lose? What if you felt guilty for landing your friend in the clink 10 years ago? If you were the one she landed in the clink and you were only being released to die of cancer in her care? If you used to be a nearly unbeatable pair of scam artists who still had a stash of disguises left over from your glory days and a longing to feel some excitement again?

All this and more are the questions that Frauds, a new drama starring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker, flings at us on a wild, thrilling six-part ride that follows two conwomen bent on pulling off one last job. As with 2023’s Maryland, Jones co-created this with Anne-Marie O’Connor – who wrote every episode – and it has all the same strengths. Just as the mystery-thriller formula there was used as background to the psychodramas gradually unveiled, here the grand heist Jones’ character Roberta (Bert) has carefully planned in prison since her diagnosis is the vehicle for an exploration of friendship, betrayal and love in all its forms.

Bert is released into the care of Sam (Whittaker), who lives nearby in the Andalucían hills. Guilt stopped her from ever visiting Bert, but she has stayed close and worked no cons without her – “Bit crass with you in prison for a job I fucked up.” And for her new, if brief, life on the outside she has bought her plenty of new underwear, because there are many ways for female friends to offer contrition and one is the purchase of “a big lady-bra” after a decade of underwire-free prison-issue rubbish.

Sam wants to carry on leading her quiet life and look after Bert till the end. Bert has other ideas. And when your daftest friend has other ideas – well, those tend to be the ones you follow. Their old dynamic gradually reasserts itself and Bert’s plans are already in motion by the time she lays out the full blueprint for the heist. The series plays around with the timeline – to good rather than eye-rolling effect – to give us the set-pieces first and then the explanations. So we watch the pair slipping jewellery and watches off wealthy guests’ wrists at a funeral – and bagging a golden crown of thorns because why wouldn’t you if you could? – before ripping off their wigs and turning their mourning clothes inside out to become colourful suits as they stride out and down the church steps, awash with adrenaline and assets.

They need the assets to fund the plan. This involves recruiting a forger (with, unbeknown to them, a gambling problem that is due to attract unwanted attention) in the form of magician’s assistant Jackie (Elizabeth Berrington), who has the technical know-how to help them remove and replace the target painting (Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator at the Museo Reina Sofía). They also enlist feminist art collector Celine (Kate Fleetwood), who specialises in works by male artists exploiting women. She is as ruthless as any of the gangsters the forger and their funeral robbery are drawing towards them, including – most perilously of all – their old boss Miss Take (Talisa Garcia), a modern-day Fagin who had them running scams for her from their teens. She did not take well to the pair’s assertion of themselves as independent conwomen so there’s ground to make up there.

Plot twists are layered between deepening revelations about Bert and Sam’s history, so you get all the satisfactions of a Thomas Crown Affair-ish caper – executed with no shortage of brio and admirable willingness to skate over rampant absurdities – plus a mesmerisingly intricate portrait of a friendship that is possibly as toxic as Bert’s cancer but just as impossible to uproot. Jones gives perhaps her finest and most complex performance yet, as the damaged, resentful Bert with her lifetime pursuit of excitement to distract from the gnawing pain within that has nothing to do with metastasising cells. Whittaker stands with her, doing brilliant work in a slightly less interesting part, and together with O’Connor they create a fantastically stylish, emotionally rich and profoundly intelligent piece of entertainment that is feminist to its bones without preaching and in every way a triumph. More again, soon, please.

Frauds aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.