Details

1963. The scandal that shocked society. Stephen Ward deals with the victim of the Profumo Affair - not, as is widely supposed, John Profumo himself, the disgraced Minister for War, nor even the fatally wounded Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, but the society osteopath whose private libertarian experiments blew up in his own and everyone else's face. In a trial as emblematic to the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde's was to the nineteenth - from which he was the only protagonist to emerge with some dignity and honour - Ward became the targeted scapegoat of a furiously self-righteous Establishment. By no means a hero, he was a reluctant martyr, thanks to an unholy alliance between press and police of a kind we can all too readily recognise today; inadvertently, he was the hinge between two worlds and the harbinger of a revolution in manners, music and morals when the ordered, stuffy, respectful universe of the fifties gave way to the classless, truculent, unstoppable sixties. Stephen Ward website.

Cast/Performers

Alexander Hanson (Stephen Ward), Charlotte Spencer (Christine Keeler), Charlotte Blackledge (Mandy Rice Davies), Anthony Calf (Lord Astor), Daniel Flynn (John Profumo), Joanna Riding (Valerie Hobson), Ian Conningham (Ivanov), Chris Howell (Murray), Ricardo Coke Thomas (Lucky Gordon), Wayne Robinson (Johnny Edgecomp), Martin Callaghan, Kate Coyston, Jason Denton, Julian Forsyth, Amy Griffiths, Paul Kemble, Emma Kate Nelson, Carl Sanderson, Emily Squibb, John Stacey, Helen Ternent, Tim Walton

Creatives/Company

Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Lyrics(s): Christopher Hampton, Don Black
Book by: Christopher Hampton
Producer(s): Robert Fox Limited, Really Useful Group
Director: Richard Eyre
Design: Rob Howell
Lighting: Peter Mumford
Sound: Paul Groothuis
Choreographer: Stephen Mear