Thomas Hyde’s one-man chamber opera about the society osteopath scapegoated during the Profumo affair dates from 2008, when it was first performed at the Hampstead and Highgate festival. It owes its reputation, however, to Nova Music Opera’s 2015 Cheltenham production – subsequently seen in Presteigne and at LSO St Luke’s – which now forms the basis of its first recording. In the interim, Ward had once again become the focus of attention, firstly through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward The Musical and, more importantly, through Geoffrey Robertson’s book Stephen Ward is Innocent OK, a forceful demand that the verdict of his trial, on a fabricated charge of living off immoral earnings, be overturned.

Setting a libretto by David Norris, That Man Stephen Ward is not so much a polemic as an ironic, if desperately sad portrait of the man himself, cast as a monologue in which he looks back over his life in the weeks between his arrest and the night of July 30, 1963, when, in anticipation of the guilty verdict the following day, he took a fatal overdose of barbiturates. Ward is seen as a garrulous, charming hedonist, catastrophically given to vicarious involvement in the sex lives of others. The score tacitly identifies him as a tragic clown: Hyde deploys the same instrumental combination as Pierrot lunaire, albeit with the addition of a percussionist; and Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer is witheringly quoted, precisely at the point when Ward realises that the establishment he served is now abandoning him. The vocal line glides in and out of Sprechstimme, broadening into lyricism for a sequence of formal set pieces: cabaret songs; a big Handelian parody; and a nostalgic aria of farewell just before Ward’s suicide.

You need, perhaps, to see it (regrettably, I haven’t) rather than just listen: Hyde specifies that Profumo, Christine Keeler and Eugene Ivanov should be played by dancers, and you sometimes miss their physical presence, both in Ward’s over-long platonic apostrophe to Keeler and in the complex imaginary party scene, which gathers all the players in the Profumo affair together. But singer-actor Damian Thantrey gives a powerhouse performance as Ward, wonderfully sustaining his cut-glass pronunciation, and impeccably shifting voice and accent as he imagines conversations with Keeler, Lord Astor, the police, his judges and even Churchill, who was one of Ward’s osteopathy patients. George Vass conducts with committed precision. Playing and recorded sound are both excellent. It’s a fascinating achievement, beautifully done.