Londoners have a recent example of a ‘Gone With the Wind’ debacle – Trevor Nunn’s short-lived musical – to conjure with. Elsewhere, audiences are less likely to associate that august movie with chaos and cock-up. Ron Hutchinson’s play depicts the moment in its creation when producer David O Selznick sacked director George Cukor, threw out the script and locked the new writer and director in his office for five days until they produced a rewrite. The result is an amusing if unsurprising comedy in which Hutchinson, far from demythologising ‘GWTW’, applies a little elbow grease to its sheen.
The play is essentially a three-hander (Rebecca Calder’s secretary has little to do) in which original producer Selznick, screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Victor Fleming go stir-crazy on a diet of peanuts and bananas in Selznick’s office, cranking up movie magic while the actors twiddle their thumbs and Selznick haemorrhages $50,000 a day. It’s a farcical, not a credible, scenario: I believed neither that Hecht and Fleming would put up with captivity, nor that a workable script would be produced in these extremes. The play also advertises Hutchinson’s own thoughts on the processes of writing and producing (about which Selznick improbably speechifies as the deadline looms) and shoe-horns in some unwieldy stuff about Selznick and Hecht’s Jewishness and the impending Holocaust.
Director Sean Holmes and his excellent cast throw themselves full-pelt at this likeable but limited play, as Andy Nyman’s Selznick (pictured),and Steven Pacey’s Fleming act out the novel for Nicholas Woodeson’s very sceptical Hecht, who never even got past the book’s first page. Roleplay, slapstick, tears and several rather droll lines (‘Our two-timing, slave-driving heroine is about to add child abuse to her resumé’) are animated with vim to ensure that, frankly, you’ll give a damn – but only just.
1 comment
Amazing!