Stephen Ward
Friday, 13 December 2013
Spoiler alert... because it's still in Previews and hasn't opened yet and it's not conventional behaviour to review it yet. Also it's quite hard to be objective about something when you're sitting next to the writer and his wife (Andrew's wife is lovely and very nice, incidentally).

But I enjoyed it immensely and thought it was different, brave and very good indeed. It somehow seemed to me more Sondheim than Lloyd Webber. Unusual, clever, courageous (it's not a populist theme - an innocent person wrongly convicted by the Establishment).

The girl playing Keeler is terrific, as is the actor playing Stephen Ward. Good old Anthony Calf is great and there's a lovely caricature of a drunken Russian.

I remember the Profumo affair when I was a teenager; it set the world afire. But it's odd as a subject for a musical and I suspect it won't be a great success with critics or public. But it deserves to be.