Theatre This article is more than 16 years oldReviewMoonlight and Magnolias
This article is more than 16 years oldTricycle, LondonIn January 1939, the movie Gone With the Wind went into production. Three weeks later, producer David O Selznick closed the set and sacked the director, George Cukor. With just five days before shooting was due to resume, he hired Ben Hecht to write a new script (Hecht had not read the book) and pulled Victor Fleming off The Wizard of Oz - where he was slugging Judy Garland and grappling with fornicating Munchkins - to direct. Ron Hutchinson's comedy imagines what might have happened during the five days in Selznick's locked office as the three men turned a 1,037-page novel into a 130-page screenplay that became one of Hollywood's highest grossing movies.
Bananas and peanuts are strongly in evidence, and monkeys typing comes to mind, but frankly, my dears, you will give a damn because Hutchinson's script displays the smart, old-fashioned wit of a 1940s screwball comedy. At its best, it celebrates the romance and creativity of the movies and the pain of making them.
Hutchinson is a successful Hollywood scriptwriter; in Hecht, a Jew aware of the coming European war, and torn between his role as a dream merchant and his longing to "make America look its ugly mug in the face", he explores the tension of the writer who wants to make art but who is always the hired hack.
It is an entertaining couple of hours that sometimes seems to be trying too hard to give us a good time. But this gossipy homage to Hollywood is niftily acted by Duncan Bell as Hecht, Andy Nyman as Selznick, a man desperate to make his own dream come true, and Steven Pacey as Fleming, who was so certain he was working on a turkey that he turned down a slice of the profits.
· Until November 3. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
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