Stephen Ward at the Aldwych Theatre

Stephen Ward was the free-living society physician who introduced the major players in the government-toppling 1963 Profumo sex-and-espionage scandal to each other. The musical that bears his name puts Ward's story in the spotlight, and reveals that it was he, not disgraced Minister for War John Profumo, who was the real victim of the affair.

In a lurid, headline-dominating trial as emblematic of the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde's was of the nineteenth, Ward was the only person to emerge with some dignity and honour. But he became the scapegoat of a furiously self-righteous Establishment, and was hounded by press and police until he could no longer tolerate 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 unwitting herald of the revolution in manners, music and morals that came to characterise the sixties.