Richard Eyre will direct the world premiere of Stephen Ward, opening in the West End later this year. Tickets go on sale on 28 June 2013 for the production which will preview at the Aldwych Theatre from 3 December 2013 with press night on 19 December 2013 and is currently booking to 1 March 2014.
With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book and lyrics are by playwright Christopher Hampton and lyricist Don Black with whom Lloyd Webber previously collaborated on the multi Tony award-winning Sunset Boulevard. Designs are by Rob Howell with choreography by Stephen Mear, lighting by Peter Mumford and sound by Paul Groothuis. Stephen Ward is produced by Robert Fox Limited and the Really Useful Group. Casting will be announced in due course.
1963. The scandal that shocked society. Stephen Ward deals with the victim of the Profumo Affair - not, as is widely supposed, John Profumo himself, the disgraced Minister for War, nor even the fatally wounded Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, but the society osteopath whose private libertarian experiments blew up in his own and everyone else's face. In a trial as emblematic to the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde's was to the nineteenth - from which he was the only protagonist to emerge with some dignity and honour - Ward became the targeted scapegoat of a furiously self-righteous Establishment. By no means a hero, he was a reluctant martyr, thanks to an unholy alliance between press and police of a kind we can all too readily recognise today; inadvertently, he was the hinge between two worlds and the harbinger of a revolution in manners, music and morals when the ordered, stuffy, respectful universe of the fifties gave way to the classless, truculent, unstoppable sixties.
New tickets just released. Now booking until May 2014! If you read Roald Dahl’s book as a child you’ll know exactly how potent the story of 