Moonlight & Magnolias at the Tricycle Theatre

Moonlight & Magnolias at the Tricycle Theatre

29 July, 2008
by: Jimmy

Here's some fun froth. Back at the Tricycle Theatre after a successful run last October Ron Hutchinson's Moonlight and Magnolias succeeds where so few other theatrical comedies do by actually having some jokes. Trapped in a locked office three of Hollywood's more remarkable behind-the-scenes players; Producer David O Selznick, Director Victor Fleming and card carrying Socialist screenwriter Ben Hecht have a week to adapt Margaret Mitchell's thousand page slab of melodrama Gone with the Wind.

Filming has already begun, Atlanta has already been burnt, but seventeen previous screenplays (including one by F Scott Fitzgerald) have been rejected by Selznick and MGM now faces ruin while Hecht, charged with rescuing the film, hasn't read the book. Cue Selznick's solution of locking himself and the others in an office filled with bananas and peanuts (his idea of brain food) to force a screenplay into being. As Hecht hasn't read the book Selznick and Fleming will need to act it out between them; thus runs the main joke, though thankfully not the only one.

This is good natured stuff with some smart dialogue, amusing movie anecdotes (did Margaret Mitchell really prefer Groucho Marx to Clark Gable to play her male lead?) and just enough premise to allow the actors to throw themselves around a lot, gurn gleefully and shout loudly in occasionally quavering American accents. Andy Nyman as Selznick is a fantastically energetic lead and director Sean Holmes should be congratulated both for bringing out strong performances from his cast, and for bolstering a slightly uneven script with some few neat onstage tricks, mainly involving said bananas and peanuts.

The play itself isn't perfect; much of the political angst seem shoe-horned in, the debate between escapist versus moral film making is a touch too worthy, while there is a half-hearted digression into Jewish persecution, identity and self-hatred that sounds like diet Philip Roth and which even the cast seem a little embarrassed to pursue. There is also a concluding moral gesture which backfires as Selznick eventually 'relents' to Hecht's pressurizing, writing a cheque to an aid movement helping Jewish exiles escape Nazism. (It's a dramatic damp squib; as presented here, Selznick's too nice for his generosity to ever be in doubt.) Unfortunately coming after his flamboyant defence of excess – for which Gone with the Wind is the exemplar – it's a little difficult to tell whether concern drives this act or whether he is still in thrall to the 'blockbusting gamble' and to throwing away money like so many peanut shells. The intrusion of 'real world' politics jars uncomfortably, threatening the conceit of heroic film production and undermining the finale.

Nevertheless the play moves along with such zip and such a genuine sense of fun that these faults are easy to ignore. Well worth popping along to and I don't say that often.

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Jimmy