Later this month, three new plays by Gill Adams will be read on stage at Hull’s Ensemble 52 theatre. Starman, Hooked and Wild Man on My back reportedly delve into the “highs and lows of celebrity life”.

The playwright herself says she is out to “shock and delight”. She wouldn’t have to try very hard to do either with Keeler, her stage adaptation of Christine Keeler’s 2001 book The Truth at Last, which comes to the Alhambra later this month.

It’s a dramatisation of what became known as the Profumo Scandal that ultimately brought about the political demise of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963 and changed forever the deferential public attitude towards top politicians.

Sordid and poignant, this story involving sex, spies, high society and politics in early 1960s swinging London, may seem par for the course today when public respect for politicians is at an all-time low and the media’s fascination with celebrity is at an all-time high.

But in the summer of 1961, when society osteopath, socialite and artist, Dr Stephen Ward, introduced model Christine Keeler to the great and the good at an aristocratic weekend party, the public and the media, perhaps naively, assumed that a strong sense of duty and responsibility prevailed among their rulers.

In the 50 years since that fateful country house party, events surrounding the Profumo Affair have been the subject of books and films including the 1989 movie Scandal, in which John Hurt played Stephen Ward as a man more sinned against than sinning.

In this play is Ward, who was accused of living on immoral earnings but committed suicide on August 3, 1963, before the end of his trial, the victim of injustice or, as Keeler suggests in her book, the devil incarnate who tried to drown her?

Paul Nicholas, who plays Ward in Keeler, said: “I don’t think for a minute he was living off immoral earnings. He enjoyed the influence he had with the powerful through these girls.”

In fact Paul also produces and directs the play. He bought the rights to Christine Keeler’s book shortly after it was published and commissioned Gill Adams to write the script.

“After she completed it I put it on in a little theatre in North London. Alice Coulthard had just come out of drama school at the time: I gave her her first job.

“When the idea of putting it on bigger stages came up we spoke about it and she said she would re-do it. As I don’t watch soap operas I didn’t realise she had been in Emmerdale for two years, so that was a bit of a result for me,” he added.

Producing and directing would be enough for anyone. Paul said he approached other actors with a name to play Stephen Ward, without any luck.

“They liked the part but didn’t fancy a touring production lasting six to eight weeks. So it got to the point where I said, ‘Oh well, I’ll do it then’. It sounds like an ego trip, but it isn’t,” he says.

Paul said the play doesn’t come down on the side of any of the major characters. Nor does it explore the allegations about Ward being a Soviet spy.

“I was more interested in the stuff we already know. Certain events in the past stay in the present, like the President Kennedy assassination. I was about 15 or 16 when all this broke; it is still very much in the forefront of my mind; in some ways it’s a template for all that followed...These people were selling stories – kiss and tell – so it has a resonance.

“It led to the unshackling of the Press to the point where some of them are hacking into people’s phones. So it’s kind of modern and old.”

And what of Christine Keeler, now 69; how does Gill Adams depict her? Alice Coulthard, formerly wild child Maisie Wylde in Emmerdale, plays the part – her first big theatre role in a touring production.

She said: “Bearing in mind it’s an adaptation of Christine Keeler’s autobiography, it is sympathetic to her sensibilities. She was 16 when she was working in Soho and met Stephen Ward. He was older. She was kind of victimised, but she was also flirtatious and didn’t realise the gravity of what she was in.”

Alice was born in 1981, 18 years after Stephen Ward’s suicide, which is where the play ends.

“I had heard of the Profumo Affair, but I didn’t really know in any more depth what had happened. These days we are de-sensitised to this kind of thing because it is so frequently represented in the Press,” she said.

“Investigative journalism is much more rife in the media; so it’s hard for us to imagine how shocking these events were. You’ve got to try to take yourself back to the time when things were brushed under the carpet,” she added.

The main difference between rehearsing for a big stage show and shooting a soap opera like Emmerdale seems to be speed.

“With Emmerdale you shoot a scene in half-an-hour: it’s very immediate, whereas this is much more reflective and going back over things.

“The great thing about theatre is that you get another chance to do it. There’s something exciting about having another go at it,” she added.

Keeler is on at the Alhambra from September 27 to October 1. Tickets are available on (01274) 432000.