Scandal is a dish best served hot and fresh. So Robin Soans's anthology of recycled reminiscences, verbatim theatre culled from his interviews with the famous and notorious - wrecked by greed or mendacity, sex or bad luck - inevitably tastes rather stale, even mouldy.

After all, those who tumble from grace these days soften their fall with lucre from confessional autobiographies. People such as Jonathan Aitken, Edwina Currie and the impenitent Neil and Christine Hamilton, brought to utterly convincing, sometimes comic life on Hampstead's stage by, respectively, Philip Bretherton, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Michael Mears and Caroline Quentin, have been quick to put damaged lives on public display.

We live in a Big Brother age of indecent self-exposure, with a yellow press that invents, harasses and humiliates, but this is no new phenomenon - just one infinitely more publicised, wide-ranging and vicious. In the Fifties a crop of tabloids bloomed no end of snooping stories on blue-blooded scandals, Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. Lord Montagu, memorably presented here by Tim Preece as a stoic, saddened survivor of a personal catastrophe in 1954 when he was jailed for then illicit homosexual relations, opened the newspaper floodgates to discussion of that unspeakable practice - queer life.

So do we really need or want, therefore, to be taken upon another artfully organised tour of, for instance, Jonathan Aitken's state of mind? It's a mind cleansed and turned spiritual, he explains, thanks to jail, sorrow and disgrace. Aitken's articulate fury over gross press harassment while serving time strikes better, dramatic and more comic notes.

All too often in Life After Scandal, the familiar self-exposers and emotional strip-teasers become wearisome rather than illuminating. Edwina Currie once more complains her lost lover John Major failed to slip her into some high-ranking government position, while that coughing major from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? rages over his sense of being caught in a miscarriage of justice . On a stage adorned with ugly square pillars, tables and chairs, scandal victims confide to us in single streams of consciousness. Soans's highly irritating technique, with its chopping and changing of narratives, is to launch Lord Montagu upon his life story and then temporarily halt its flow while Bruce Alexander's raffish Lord Brocket (prison for fraud) and then Duncan Roy (gay film director jailed for credit card offences) begin theirs.

Despite the skill and elegance of Anthony Clark's beautifully acted production, this documentary repeats rather than develops. Soans discovers little new about our lust for scandal or eagerness to see the high and mighty fallen.

The best sequences, riveting examples of Tony Blair's Machiavellian nature, are supplied by Craig Murray, the ambassador who complained about human rights violations in Uzbekistan then found his reputation remorselessly blackened. He also suggests just how Blair sabotaged Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's attempt to keep foreign policy ethical: soon after Cook's campaign began reports of his affair with his secretary started appearing in the press. Life After Scandal aims high but will please the prurient curious.