Even for a woman of easy virtue, Marguerite Gautier, aka La dame aux camélias, has had a pretty promiscuous existence. She's been a novel by Dumas, an opera by Verdi, a film with Garbo, a ballet that brought Fonteyn and Nureyev to Covent Garden, a feminist play by Pam Gems — and, last night, a West End musical with a book by the creators of Les Misérables and a title-character who succumbs to the hypocritical hatred of her old friends in the newly liberated Paris of 1944 or 1945.

What, not to that very popular and highly traditional 19th-century affliction, tuberculosis? No, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg have updated her story to wartime France, and done so in a way that explains why the show is having its premiere in London, not Paris. Jonathan Kent’s production begins and ends with assorted nobs hitting Ruthie Henshall’s Marguerite, spitting at her, cutting off her hair, chucking her about, kicking her when she’s down. And that’s ironic, indeed Ironic with a capital I, because they’re the same spoiled, selfish, racist collaborators who were fêting her when she was a famous chanteuse and the mistress of a German general, Alexander Hanson’s Otto von Stadt.

So how, when and where does her boyish lover, Armand, enter the equation? Well, he’s the pianist at her 40th birthday party, an occasion that allows the Paris rich to exchange black-market silk stockings and proclaim their dislike of the Jews and those “barbarians”, the British, while Hanson’s severe Otto denounces them as “profiteers, crooks, spongers, every one French scum”.

Then there’s an air-raid warning, which sends all but Marguerite and Julian Ovenden’s Armand scuttling rodent-like to the cellars, followed by an explosion which spectacularly destroys the great window at the back of Paul Brown’s Belle Époque set — though not before an equally big kiss has got the plot going.

And here’s a paradox I still can’t explain. Henshall and Ovenden are pretty impressive in both the acting and the singing departments. She can be haughty but also broken, forlorn, poignant. He manages to be intense without being sententious and rapturous without seeming wet. And how refreshing to hear voices that cope with every note in songs which, as composed by Michel Legrand and accoutred with plain, bold lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, soar and dive in often hummable ways. Yet I found myself unmoved when Henshall’s Marguerite, by now as fragile and pale as any trad TB victim, leaves her pianist, her Paris and the planet.

Why? Well, I think it’s because the tension in Kent’s production is to be found more in the subplot than in Marguerite and Armand’s doomed affair. Boublil and Schönberg have provided Armand with a sister, Annalene Beechey’s Annette, who gets involved in the Resistance. Moreover, they’ve given that sister a lover, Simon Thomas’s Lucien, who is a Jew at a time when (another dig at those collaborators) the French authorities are eagerly joining the Germans in rounding up his co-religionists.

And their pains and perils matter more than what happens between the love-birds in an attic (or so the back-projections suggest) somewhere near Sacré-Coeur.

Actually, the most interesting character is Otto, who veers from love of Marguerite to a dangerous bitterness at her coldness, from Nazi denunciations of “coloured music” to officer-class honour, from near-rapist to self-hating gentleman. What’s needed here is music that reflects his angry, agonised contradictions, but this time the composer fails us — leaving us with a decent, enjoyable but not exactly thrilling show.

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