Chit Chat - Bad case of wind

Published Monday 31 March 2008 at 10:55 by Tabard

Gone with the Wind, Trevor Nunn’s latest West End offering, is soon to open at the New London.

It is, of course, not the first time that the great novel has been given the musical theatre treatment. Nor is it its first West End outing.

Back in 1972, it played at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in a production that was - rather bizarrely - made in Japan. In Tokyo, to be precise.

A couple of years earlier, the show had opened under the title of Scarlett, and clocked in at a mammoth four hours of running time. It was cut down and renamed when it came to Drury Lane, but was still not without its problems.

On first night, memorably, a horse did its business on stage.

This led Noel Coward, who was in the audience and had also found one of the young performers in the show rather obnoxious, to comment: “If they’d stuffed the child’s head up the horse’s arse, they would have solved two problems at once.”

Let’s hope no-one suffers a similar fate in Nunn’s new version.

On a side note, Tabard is wondering whether this first version of Gone with the Wind might be the first and only time a show has transferred to the West End from Japan? Answers on a postcard.