Gone With The Wind might be the highest-grossing film ever, ushering in the era of the blockbuster as we know it, but this doesn't mean the shoot was easy.
It was, in fact, anything but, as playwright Ron Hutchinson learned from scriptwriter Ben Hecht's autobiography.
Hecht recounts frantic days locked in producer David O. Selznick's office and Hutchinson, with brio and just four actors, dramatises the same. Rarely do theatre and cinema sit so comfortably together.
GWTW had been shooting for three weeks when Selznick fired director George Cukor, ordered Victor Fleming to abandon the mutinous munchkins of The Wizard of Oz to work on this project instead, and commanded Hecht to rewrite the script - which 17 writers had tinkered with - in just five days.
No matter that the acerbic, Left-leaning Hecht had given up on Margaret Mitchell's melodramatic doorstopper by page two.
If getting this production back on track meant that Selznick and Fleming had to act out every chapter to a dubious Hecht - 'She goes to Atlanta, she leaves Atlanta, she goes back to Atlanta, she wants whatisname, then she wants Rhett Butler, he leaves, he comes back, whatisname leaves' - then that was what they would do.
Hutchinson's snappy script, and by transference Sean Holmes's production, is at its blissful best when it becomes a fast-paced screwball comedy, with oneliners flying about among the peanut shells, banana skins and balled-up pieces of paper that start to overtake Selznick's increasingly besieged office.
There is a pleasing tang of sassy Thirties films such as His Girl Friday to the insults that Andy Nyman, Steven Pacey and Duncan Bell, all excellent, trade. Only when Hutchinson veers off into wider generalisations about the crazy, lovable old world of the movies does momentum flag.
If The 39 Steps, which started at the Tricycle, can make it big with West End theatregoers, I'd say there was, frankly, a great chance they'd give a damn about this, too.
Until 3 November, Information: 020 7328 1000, www.tricycle.co.uk.
Moonlight And Magnolias
Tricycle Theatre
Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR
