We tend to sharpen the details we like and smudge over others, simplifying the narrative, fetishising the fashions, reducing history to a few memorable catchphrases. Writer Amanda Coe’s version seizes Christine Keeler as its protagonist, a young woman we first see pursued by the camera, like a startled gazelle, immaculately turned out in a polka-dot dress. It is worth remembering, of course, that Keeler is just 19 years old, stunningly gorgeous, and, to all appearances, independent in a confirmedly swinging London. Its telling – heaving with sensuous imagery and very light on intellectual demand – now belongs to the Instagram age, simply for worse. “Men are such fools,” Keeler tells us, as the show lays out her sexual history with the vigour of Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

Source: The Irish Times December 29, 2019 23:26 UTC