IN the opening voiceover to Gill Adams’s account of “the biggest political sex scandal to rock the British nation in the 20th century”, Alice Coulthard’s Christine Keeler says you will probably only know her as “that naked bird on a chair”. By the end, you would prefer to do so still.

The infamous chair begins the play unoccupied, rather like far too many seats for a week-long run of a pedestrian touring production that has drawn waspishly dismissive reviews and failed to find more ways than the promise of some strictly unnecessary nudity – the rather lovely Miss Coulthard exiting side on from a swimming pool at Lord Astor’s country pad, Cliveden House – to draw an audience.

The play follows Keeler from the moment the 16-year-old Soho club dancer meets osteopath, artist and party fixer Stephen Ward (Paul Nicholas, overloading himself with another duty beyond director and producer) through to the trial that precipitated the fall of the Macmillan government in 1963.

Supposedly, the unique selling point is Adams basing her script on Keeler’s 2001 autobiography, The Truth At Last. However, in 2011, how many people are still interested in her truth, 48 years after the Jack Profumo Affair involving teenage London showgirl Keeler and her romps with Secretary of State for War Profumo (Andrew Piper) and Russian naval attaché Eugene Ivanov (Andrew Grose)?

These are the sepia recollections of a pretty Bambi who wanted to have fun; what is needed is Hull playwright Adams’s own perspective on the affair, both as a woman and as a social and historical commentator reflecting on the significance of Keeler’s experiences at the hands of an exploitative establishment before the permissive Sixties’ revolution. This was the scandal, after all, that set in motion the tabloid newspaper lust for celebrity sexposés and establishment witch-hunts.

Such matters are mentioned briefly in the voiceover prologue and epilogue, but Keeler mainly replays the events of the time with clunky, sometimes corny dialogue, busty burlesque dancing by Keeler’s fellow showgirls (Katie Murray, Justine Michelle) and a Tarzan holler from Grose’s Ivanov in tight swimming trunks.

Seeing it all through Keeler’s eyes reduces the story to one of belated self-promotion yet naivety, Keeler the victim, the puppet of smooth puppeteer Ward. An over-riding sense of seediness and a lack of moral responsibility among powerful men prevails, but without the context for such behaviour. Consequently this play feels shallow and cheap, not unlike the swimming pool and Charles Camm’s set.

Nicholas’s wig raises a smile, as does the lack of dripping water on Keeler’s discarded swimsuit, just two of the misjudgements of an ill-conceived exhumation of a story that ironically does Christine Keeler no favours.

Keeler, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 8713024 or www.grandoperahouseyork.org.uk