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Frankly, by the end, we don’t give a damn
MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS
Tricycle Theatre
THREE men are locked in a room with five days to fix a troubled and speculative film-venture called Gone With the Wind.
Resigned to disaster and professional disgrace, a cynical director and a heart-on-sleeve scriptwriter are coaxed, inspired and bullied to their goal by David O Selznick (Andy Nyman), legendary Hollywood producer and self-styled dream-maker to the masses.
As the floor of their temporary prison cell fills with the banana skins and peanut shells shed from the only food that Selznick will allow them (he thinks it good for their brains), dramatist Ben Hecht (Duncan Bell) – called in after 18 previous screenwriters have failed to adapt one of the best-selling novels from the 1930s – takes a look at one page of the famously florid book and refuses to read any more.
So Selznick and Victor Fleming (Steven Pacey) – an A-list director plucked straight from shooting The Wizard of Oz – elect to act it out, scene by scene, as Hecht painfully creates a script describing Scarlett O’Hara’s romantic indecisions and the slow destruction of the good ol’ Confederacy.
Ron Hutchinson’s play is based on true material – Selznick really did lock himself away with his reluctant collaborators and rode the derision of his contemporaries to rescue Gone With the Wind from ignominious and financially ruinous failure.
But while the conceit – the three men, the one room, the five days – has dramatic potential, this aims for quickfire screwball comedy with the central gag being, of course, that Gone With the Wind turned out fairly successful after all (“I know a turkey when I see one”, says Fleming, choosing a flat fee over a share in the film’s profits).
The play is packed with pratfalls, misunderstandings, and humour wrenched from the strapping Fleming acting out maidservant Prissy’s forelock-touching obeisance to Scarlett.
It relies on an energy that is periodically brought up short by Hecht’s intermittent role as the play’s conscience, solemnly pronouncing on Hollywood’s anti-semitism, the horrors of Civil War era segregation, and the sheer artistic indignity of it all.
This attempt to add weight – Hecht, recently bombarded with banana skins, takes time out to gravely describe the film-set as “the stockyard of the human soul” – only slows the play down.
Until November 3
020 7328 1000
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