Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical Stephen Ward

Stephen Ward was the free-living high society physician who introduced the major players in the government-toppling 1963 Profumo sex-and-espionage scandal to each other. The musical that carries his name puts Ward’s account in the limelight, and discloses that it was he, not discredited Minister for War John Profumo, who was the actual victim of the affair.

In a lurid, headline-dominating trial as symbolic of the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde’s was of the nineteenth, Ward was the only person to come out with some dignity and honour. But he became the scapegoat of a furiously holier-than-thou Establishment, and was hunted by press and police until he could no longer stand the pressure.

Ward was a reluctant martyr – a bridge between the ruling class and the embryonic permissive society, who history now shows to have been an unintentional herald of the revolution in manners, music and morals that came to characterise the sixties.

Full cast: Alexander Hanson (Stephen Ward), Charlotte Spence (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 and Tim Walton.

Set and costumes by Rob Howell, with lighting by Peter Mumford, sound by Paul Groothuis, production design by John Driscoll and choreography by Stephen Mear.

Directed by Richard Eyre, book and lyrics by Christopher Hampton and Don Black.
Produced by Robert Fox Limited and the Really Useful Group.

Evenings: Monday to Saturday 7.30pm
Matinees: Wednesday and Saturday 2.30pm

Booking From: 3rd Dec 2013
Booking Until: 1st Mar 2014

Aldwych Theatre
49 Aldwych
London, WC2B 4DF

Updated Friday 13th September 2013