This energy-guzzling, epically draining production ought to be slapped with a congestion charge. Trevor Nunn’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ is big, bland and rolls grandly down the middle of the road. With its mammoth run time (3 hours 40 minutes) and lack of dramatic flair, it’s a wonder the wheels don’t come off entirely. Two things preserve it from the ditch: Nunn’s professional handling of the pace, and the talent of some of the cast. Thanks to Jill Paice’s feisty, feminist Scarlett, Darius Danesh’s sexy, soul-searching Rhett (yes, really) and, especially, Natasha Yvette Williams’s humorous, wise and powerfully voiced Mammy, it’s a fairly enjoyable ride. But the performers, no matter how much wishin’ and wantin’ and strivin’ and frettin’ they do in their gorgeous crinolines, can’t improve their vehicle.
With a thousand seats to sell, and top-price tickets £60 a pop, it’s a big box-office mistake not to spotlight the relationship of Scarlett and Rhett (and cut the Confederate ladies’ sideshow into the bargain). Rookie writer Margaret Martin remains faithful to so many discardable details of Margaret Mitchell’s novel that the characters whisk and whirl from scene to song too quickly for you to get a fix on them.
Seventy years ago, the movie pulled in huge crowds with a woozy, lush, amoral appeal expressed perfectly in the smouldering relationship of its co-stars Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Nowadays, there are different unsaids: sex has been on the table for years, while the racial politics of Mitchell’s eulogy to the lost South deserve to be kicked under it for ever. While Nunn and Martin’s revisionism is commendable, tacking on ahistorically optimistic, aspirational songs to characters that remain minor (Scarlett’s maids Mammy and Prissy) only highlights the fact that their struggles are major, compared to the petulant anguish of the leads. To rewrite this story as a musical fantasy for modern times, with truly soul-stirring music, you might just have to make Scarlett black.
