Oscar Wilde advised that "one should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give interest to one's old age." It was advice ignored by 19-year-old Christine Keeler, who arrived in London at the start of the 1960s and immediately got things swinging. Her simultaneous affairs with the Minister for War, John Profumo, and a Russian spy, Yevgeny Ivanov, contributed to the fall of the Macmillan government, the suicide of Stephen Ward and the disgrace of Profumo, who was condemned less for his sexual shenanigans or putting the country at risk than for his ungentlemanly conduct in lying to the House of Commons over the affair. I'm inclined to think that the title of Richard Alexander and Marek Rymaszewski's musical would have been better with a question mark after it.
But this is by no means a model musical. In fact, it is a deeply dull affair with failures of narrative that might make it mildly baffling to anyone unfamiliar with the details of the Profumo scandal and who doesn't take the trouble to read the programme beforehand. It reaches its nadir when James Clyde's Stephen Ward swallows a bottle of pills and then stops - as would-be suicides always do - for a quick song before expiring.
Elsewhere, there is an ugly set from Paul Wills, some indifferent choreography, and an overdose of ballad-style songs. Besides Alexander and Rymaszewski, the programme lists no fewer than eight contributors to the book, music and lyrics, and the fact there have been so many fingers in the pie perhaps explains a lot. The evening is so keen to be all things to all people - a conspiracy theorist's delight involving MI5 spooks, a tale of political sleaze and a tragic love story - that it ends up being a muddle.
Ambiguity is often a good thing in the theatre but here the ambiguities are contradictory. Is Emma Williams' Christine supposed to be some kind of innocent angel abroad, as a couple of songs suggest, or just a right little tart? Is Stephen Ward a tragic figure and victim of MI5 or just a sleazy high-class pimp? These aren't complexities of characterisation, just confusions that never let you settle back and go with the flow. Unlike several other members of the cast, Williams rises way above the material - but, given her past track record, she would, wouldn't she?
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