Anybody who was around in 1963 will still remember the great public scandal which brought down Harold Macmillan and the Conservative government. Lewis Morley’s iconic photograph of Christine Keeler sitting astride a chair in the nude, facing the camera, her nudity hidden by the back of the chair, is one of the most repeated images of the 20th century. At the height of the Cold War society osteopath Stephen Ward introduced model Christine Keeler to John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, at a house party thrown by Lord Astor at Clivedon. She was having an affair with a naval attaché and spy at the Soviet Embassy at the time.
There’s been a film, Scandal, with Joanne Whalley as Keeler, John Hurt as Ward and Ian McKellen as Profumo. There have been two plays, Hugh Whitemore’s A Letter of Resignation with Edward Fox as Macmillan and Gill Adams’s Keeler with Paul Nicolas as Ward. There’s already been a musical, A Model Girl, and loads of songs. Now there is another musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber who claims the biggest victim was not John Profumo, Christine Keeler, nor Mandy-Rice Davies but Stephen Ward and that his arrest was a great miscarriage of justice. It acts like a play with songs and doesn’t satisfy either as a play or as a musical. The book and lyrics are by Christopher Hampton and Don Black. Richard Eyre directs. Alexander Hanson plays Ward. Joanna Riding plays Profumo’s wife; it’s only a small role, but she has the show’s best ballad, “I’m Hopeless When It Comes To You.”
The subject matter cries out for wit and satire. There is none. The lyric, which begins, “You’ve never had it so good, you’ve never had it so often,” never lives up to its promise.
The score isn’t corrosive. The debauchery at Clivedon is merely grotesque. You would think Mandy Rice-Davies’s “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” could have been turned into a song. Surely, somebody could have come up with a better title? I doubt very much the coach parties, on whom the West End musicals depend, and the tourists, who do not know who Stephen Ward is, will want to see it.