New London Theatre, London WC2
There is a play by Ron Hutchinson called Moonlight and Magnolias, recently staged at the Tricycle Theatre in London, about writing the film version of Gone With the Wind. The comedy’s big joke is that producer David O Selznick, director Victor Fleming and screenwriter Ben Hecht hammer out the script to Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel at breakneck speed. And that, pretty much, is the way director Trevor Nunn and Margaret Martin — the American composer, lyricist and book writer of this musical version — deal with Mitchell’s plot. Scenes rush by in a swirl of petticoats and Southern manners. Civil war comes and goes. Atlanta burns — all in a flash. Jill Paice’s Scarlett O’Hara gets married three times, eventually to Darius Danesh’s reformed playboy and gunrunner Rhett, who, tired of her enduring dalliance with Ashley, ultimately leaves without giving a damn.
A bigger problem than cramming in the book’s huge plot is how to deal with the racism of its slave-owning heroes and heroines. It is quickly established that the O’Haras are as good as slave-owners get. The “darkies” even get to pray with them. And Natasha Yvette Williams’s buxom black Mammy at least lends some dignity to the enslaved. But still, like Mitchell’s book, this is a sanitised Georgia where Southern trees bear no strange fruit.