It’s an unlovely venue, for sure. Charing Cross Theatre, underneath the arches, likes to welcome vagrant plays that can’t find a home elsewhere. The dripping exterior, opposite a gay love-hub named Heaven, feels as if it’s paved with tears. The foyer is scented with mildewed chip fat and the ink-black auditorium looks like a closed-down fleapit from the 1950s. Perhaps this air of neglect explains why few of its productions win rave reviews. Keeler, starring Paul Nicholas, got an unfair monstering.
The play is an absorbing docudrama, which explores the relationship between Stephen Ward and his protégée Christine Keeler. Their flatshare was a complex and unusual set-up. Ward was multitalented, socially ambitious, intelligent, charming and articulate. Keeler was a wide-eyed good-time girl with nothing but her ravishing physique to propel her forward. They were mates. He liked her company and he relished his role as father-protector. Though he fancied her, and offered to marry her, he refrained from sleeping with her. (He preferred Jamaican hookers.) He introduced her to rich old lechers and he accepted her money as well, but only to meet household bills. He used her, without doubt. But she used him too. This strange and touching conjunction of friendship and exploitation is caught superbly in Gill Adams’s script.
The scenes at Cliveden, where randy Tory bigwigs chased giggling nymphettes around the swimming-pool, are done equally well. Adams doesn’t invite us to mock or judge these priapic grandees and their simpering playmates. She presents them as they were — participants in a sophisticated game that involved exchanges on many levels. Sex and cash were, of course, part of the trading system but it also featured friendship, glamour, social advancement and the intoxicating aroma of power.
Paul Nicholas brings authority, sympathy and a certain fading sexiness to Stephen Ward.
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