Does no one ever learn from the past? An earlier musical of Margaret Mitchell's mammoth novel, having been seen in Tokyo and London, eventually burned out in Atlanta. Undeterred, theatrical tyro Margaret Martin has written book, music and lyrics for this new version which Trevor Nunn directs; and the result feels like a hectic, strip-cartoon account of a dated pop classic.
The problem is structural: how do you cram a 1,000-page novel into three-and-a-half hours of stage time? The answer is "with great difficulty".
Starting in 1861, the show bustles through 12 years of Scarlett O'Hara's life and American civil war history with such speed that nothing much registers. At one point, in order to spite her adored Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett marries, is widowed and gives birth to her first child in the space of 40 seconds.
The other key problem is political. Commendably the show seeks to avoid turning into a nostalgic paean, as the Selznick movie does, to old southern values. Far and away the best moment comes when Mammy, Prissy and all the black slaves who have kept plantation life going join forces to sing "all men fight for freedom from the moment of their birth".
This, you realise, is where the real drama lies. Confronted by a movement of history, the story of the wilful Scarlett, of her eventual marriage to the profiteering Rhett Butler and of her long-burning flame for the dithering Ashley seems small beer. Deep down, I suspect, the show's creator knows this. But she is shackled by the dead conventions of a novel which deploys history as a colourful backdrop to private emotion. What I crave is less a repeat of Gone With The Wind than a complete reversal of it: one that tells the whole story from the slaves' viewpoint and stresses the fact that large numbers ran away to join the Union armies.
Nunn's production makes tentative steps in this direction by, as in Nicholas Nickleby, splitting the narrative amongst various voices, including the black characters. But, like Martin, he is tethered to his source and forced to follow the tedious ups and downs of the privileged white southerners. To those who see Scarlett as a feminist role model, I can only say that heartless opportunism and emotional blindness don't strike me as the most attractive qualities; but Jill Paice does an excellent job of reconciling us to one of literature's least beguiling protagonists.
Darius Danesh also endows the morally dubious Rhett Butler with a graceful virility and residual guilt. But the most engaging performances come from Natasha Yvette Williams as the stoically enduring Mammy and from Jina Burrows as the flighty Prissy, both obliged to serve the self-regarding Scarlett.
The rest of the vast cast spend much of the evening hurtling round the balconies of John Napier's circumambient, Nickleby-style set, substituting energy for detailed exploration of character.
But there is something extravagantly pointless about the whole enterprise. Why revive a novel that, for all the liberal exertions of Martin and Nunn, obstinately views history through the wrong end of a telescope?
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