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Slump fever

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Gone With the Wind
New London Theatre

So the question remains. How did the critics get it so wrong? Well, there’s slump fever for a start. The newspapers keep peddling the myth that we’ll soon be living in caves, eating grass and bartering. Then up pops this lavish theatrical gamble and it gets fed into the same blender as everything else. Gone with the Wind cannot succeed because that’s not the story. Disaster is the story so it must fail. The second oddity is that the public are now doing to the critics what the critics have done to the show’s producers: openly discrediting their expertise. Oddest of all, the bad notices have lowered expectations so audiences come out feeling not just entertained but also gratified far beyond their hopes. If this is a turkey I’d like to invest in the next one.

Harper Regan, a new play by Simon Stephens, is suitably located in the smallest of the National’s three houses. The central character is a mumsy prat who, in the course of 150 minutes of inane jabber, arrives at the discovery that her dad didn’t love her the way she thought he should. Stephens has one or two problems as a playwright. He can’t nail a character in a single line so he writes lengthy wittering speeches which he’s then reluctant to cut. He also has trouble setting up dramatic encounters. The characters’ motives are never on display, just the writer’s. In this scene I’ll show how lonely she is. In this scene we’ll see her failing to communicate with her family. In this scene she’ll contemplate rough sex with a stranger. To his credit, Stephens has realised he needs help and before drafting his new script he sat down and read the whole of Euripides. Alas, this turned out to be the most fruitless encounter with classic literature since Arthur Miller gave Marilyn Monroe a copy of Ulysses. The play bears no echo of Euripides but feels like a spineless rerun of David Mamet’s Edmond. But there’s a glaring difference. Mamet writes loathsome characters and you love them. Stephens writes loathsome characters and you loathe them. It’s not fair but there it is.

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Katharine Moffitt

May 5th, 2008 8:56pm

Why does not one of the (all) unfavorable reviews I have read of this musical mention the previous effort. I don't remember whether it was 1972 or 1974 - I visited London both times from America with my late mother. I was in my 20's and do not remember much about the production except that it was performed at the Drury Lane Theatre and was also universally panned by the critics - it lasted a very brief time! I must disagree with the author; I think turning 'Gone With the Wind' into a musical is a dreadful idea - that was my and my mother's reaction in the early '70's. Perhaps someday someone will manage it - after all, I was certainly wrong about 'Les Miserables'!!