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What could you respond if that wildest friend from your teenage years reappeared? What if you were battling a terminal illness and felt completely unburdened? What if you felt guilty for getting your friend imprisoned a decade back? Suppose you were the one she got sent to prison and you were only being released to succumb to illness in her custody? If you used to be a nearly unbeatable pair of scam artists who retained a collection of costumes left over from your glory days and a deep desire for one last thrill?

These questions and beyond are the questions that Frauds, an original series featuring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker, flings at us on a exhilarating, intense six-part ride that follows two conwomen bent on pulling off one last job. Similar to an earlier work, Jones developed this series with a writing partner, and it retains similar qualities. Much like a suspense-driven structure was used as background to emotional conflicts gradually unveiled, here the grand heist the protagonist Roberta (Bert) has meticulously arranged while incarcerated since her diagnosis is the vehicle for a deep dive into friendship, betrayal and love in all its forms.

Bert is placed under the supervision of Sam (Whittaker), who lives nearby in the Spanish countryside. Guilt stopped her from seeing Bert during her sentence, but she remained nearby and worked no cons without her – “Bit crass with you in prison for a job I messed up.” And for her new, if brief, life on the outside, she has purchased numerous undergarments, because various methods exist for female friends to offer contrition and one is the purchase of “a big lady-bra” following ten years of uncomfortable institutional clothing.

Sam wants to carry on maintaining her peaceful existence and look after Bert till the end. Bert has other ideas. And when your daftest friend devises alternative schemes – well, you often find yourself going along. Their old dynamic gradually reasserts itself and her strategies are already in motion by the time she lays out the full blueprint for the robbery. 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 observe the duo slipping jewellery and watches off wealthy guests’ wrists at a memorial service – and bagging a golden crown of thorns 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 walk confidently down the chapel stairs, awash with adrenaline and assets.

They require the stolen goods to fund the plan. This involves hiring a document expert (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 possesses the necessary skills to help them remove and replace the intended artwork (a famous surrealist piece at a prominent gallery). Additionally, they recruit art enthusiast Celine (Kate Fleetwood), who focuses on works by artists depicting female subjects. She is equally merciless as any of the gangsters their accomplice and the funeral theft are attracting, including – most perilously of all – their former leader Miss Take (Talisa Garcia), a contemporary crime lord who employed them in frauds for her since their youth. She did not take well to their declaration of independence as independent conwomen so there’s ground to make up in that area.

Unexpected developments are layered between deepening revelations about Bert and Sam’s history, so you experience the full enjoyment of a sophisticated heist tale – executed with no shortage of brio and praiseworthy readiness to skate over rampant absurdities – plus a captivatingly detailed portrait of a friendship that is potentially as harmful as her illness but just as impossible to uproot. Jones gives perhaps her finest and most complex performance yet, as the damaged, resentful Bert with her endless quest for thrills to distract from her internal anguish that is unrelated to metastasising cells. Whittaker supports her, delivering excellent acting in a slightly less interesting part, and together with the writers they create a fantastically stylish, deeply moving and highly insightful work of art that is inherently empowering without preaching and in every way a triumph. More again, soon, please.