Review: Keeler *

CHRISTINE Keeler was a young woman from Uxbridge who went up to London at the start of the 1960s and got a job as a dancer in a Soho cabaret club. She was taken under the wing of wily osteopath Stephen Ward, who liked nothing better than to provide pretty young women for the amusement of powerful friends at country house parties such as those thrown by Lord Astor at Cliveden.

Ward introduced Christine to War Minister John Profumo and to Russian naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov. She had affairs with both at around the same time, and the suspicion that security secrets might have passed from Profumo to the Russian via Keeler eventually led to Profumo’s downfall and the suicide of Stephen Ward during his trial for living on immoral earnings. Keeler served time in prison for perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

This play is a warmed-up version of Keeler’s 2001 autobiography The Truth At Last, in which she claimed that Lord Denning’s inquiry into the Profumo Affair ignored her evidence as part of an official cover-up operation. Denning had concluded that there had been no breach of national security.

The best thing that can be said about this production is that the first act, in which little happens and very slowly, we are reminded uncomfortably of how very young Keeler was and how easily she was manipulated and exploited by the sinister sleaze-bag Ward, who basically pimped her to his high-flown pals. The scenes in night clubs are well choreographed by Chris Hocking.

As for the rest of the production, I’m afraid there are no bouquets for the acting, but then the cast are dealing with a script whose triteness lets them down. The piece generally fails to convey the very real Cold War paranoia which surrounded the Profumo Affair – helping to inflate it into something much more than it actually was.

What we have here is a lot of titillation but no illumination.

Until tomorrow