MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS
Tricycle
Theatre, London NW6
Opened 1 October, 2007
***
"Oh, that was unnecessary!" tutted the matrons sitting next to me when
a series of voices on a telephone line declared that one of the
characters on stage was a Jew rather than an American, the unspoken
premise being that one could not be both. My neighbours were wrong for
two reasons. Firstly, the very fact that they felt moved to comment
shows that such matters are still sensitive, and therefore issues not
to be shirked. Secondly, this is the very core of Ron Hutchinson's
play.
Superficially, it is a cynical comedy in which producer David O
Selznick, director Victor Fleming and writer Ben Hecht spend a
frenzied, claustrophobic five-day marathon trying to hammer out a
shooting script for Gone With The
Wind in mid-production. Again and again, however, Hecht's social
commitment clashes with Selznick's commercial ambition and hunger for
personal validation. It is Selznick who is dismissed as non-American,
and his fellow Jew Hecht who makes the phone calls, in order to argue
that even after all this time, the Jews are in Hollywood only on
sufferance.
Implicit parallels and contrasts are drawn between the treatment of
Jews in Europe at that time (1939) and of black people in the period of
Margaret Mitchell's novel. Hecht is incredulous that they are making a
movie in which the pro-slavery camp is sympathetic, the Ku Klux Klan – "That Klan?" he asks, gaping –
heroic, and the heroine herself strikes a black girl. Most of the
second scene is spent trying to deal with this blow, and it includes
some deliberately crass "mammy" acting from Steven Pacey as Fleming.
Not a matronly peep about this, though, perhaps because it is
successfully sold as comedy. One of the problems with the later scene
(which also includes big set-piece utterances about What Movies Are
For) is precisely that it is
later, and Sean Holmes has accurately directed it as such, with the
characters near exhaustion so that it is all words and no real action.
Still, Duncan Bell is an articulate (if erratically accented) voice of
unbelief in the project as Hecht, Andy Nyman a bustling little Napoleon
as Selznick ("Hitler couldn't take the pressure of running a studio...
and Stalin's too nice!"), and Josephine Butler steals her final scenes
as Selznick's secretary, transformed from immaculate poise to gibbering
nightmare.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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