STEPHEN WARD

The seedy life of society osteopath Stephen Ward, caught up in, and ultimately destroyed by, the Profumo affair? It’s hardly an obvious choice of subject for a West End musical, you might think. On the other hand, the story of a South American prostitute who married the Argentinian president, or even the demon barber who slit his clients’ throats before being turned into pasties by his ever-loving wife, can’t have looked too promising as source material. And yet, Evita and Sweeney Todd are both regarded as musical-theatre milestones.

Sadly, the same is unlikely to be said of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward. And, given the pedigree, this is somewhat surprising. Don Black has written the lyrics, Christopher Hampton the book. But the best one can say about the end result is that it’s rarely much more than middling.

It didn’t help proceedings on the night I saw it that ‘technical problems’ (a computer had crashed) meant that the remarkably sanguine audience had to sit for an hour before the curtain rose. So the atmosphere – on stage and in the auditorium – was pretty flat for the first hour.

This was the early 1960s when we’d never had it so good – or so often, as the one perky lyric wittily puts it in the best song of the first act. Well, maybe, but that heedless hedonism was having trouble making itself felt across the footlights. The action moved up a couple of notches in the second act, when the Establishment selects Stephen as the scapegoat for the whole sorry mess of the Profumo affair and begins manipulating the evidence that will lead to his conviction of living off immoral earnings as he downs a bottle of sleeping pills and slips into oblivion.

Now the dialogue had acquired some real crackle, the audience was engaged.


On the plus side, Alexander Hanson is excellent throughout, bringing the right raffish air to our eponymous ‘hero’ and with a fine pair of lungs to match.

Nothing wrong with Charlotte Spencer’s singing either, although she plays Christine Keeler too posh. Charlotte Blackledge has a better time of it, with the admittedly easier role of Mandy Rice-Davies.

But it says something when the only spine-tingling moment of a curiously underpowered evening comes in the form of Joanna Riding – as Profumo’s blameless wife, the actress Valerie Hobson – and her plaintive cri de coeur, I’m Hopeless When It Comes To You.

Until 1 March at the Aldwych Theatre, 49 Aldwych, London WC2: 0844-847 1712, www.stephenwardthemusical.com