Richard Eyre Talks STEPHEN WARD & More

Acclaimed theatre, film and opera director Richard Eyre opens up about his new role as helmer of an Andrew Lloyd Webber world premiere with the upcoming opening of STEPHEN WARD as well as sheds some light on what makes the septuagenarian so virile and able to direct six shows in the next year in a fascinating new interview.

Eyre states that "I really take Andrew seriously," in reference to the popular tunesmith and that STEPHEN WARD is not the sung-through style musical of Lloyd Webber's famed mantle, but much more along the lines of "a play with music."

Furthermore, Eyre adds that the show itself is "very, very British."

Just as it should be, after all, given that it is focused on the swingin' '60s in London and one of the most lurid Parliament-broaching scandals in recent UK history.

Indeed, the unseemly prostitute and pimp elements of the tale are not lost on Eyre, either, who sees the sexual awakening beginning to occur at the time and how that plays into it all as an essential element to the story - the sexual hypocrisy as told in STEPHEN WARD "acts as a metaphor for hypocrisy about everything else," he astutely opines.

And, as for the focus of the new musical and how it will play? "It's Stephen Ward's story," Eyre relates. "He's the narrator and the protagonist."

Also, asked to describe the sound of Lloyd Webber's purportedly glorious new score, Eyre was scant with details, only offering that it evoked "a particular combination of astringency and romanticism."

The official synopsis for STEPHEN WARD is as follows: "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."