Gone With the Wind has its audience

When it opened last month, Trevor Nunn’s musical version of Gone With the Wind was panned; the Evening Standard’s theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh advised those interested to catch the show before it blew away "on gales of ridicule". How prophetic this proved to be, now that an announcement comes of the show’s final curtain on 14 June.

Such an inglorious end seems unfair. When I went to see it last week the theatre was close to full, and the almost-four-hours running time of which the critics so complained had by then been cut by half an hour, bringing it to a more respectable three hours, 10 minutes.

Fans of the 226-minute film (which used to be shown at cinemas with an interval) wouldn’t expect the show to be much shorter. I even had the stamina, as a romance-starved teenager, to watch the film twice through in one sitting, wistfully longing for my own Rhett Butler to appear in the village where I lived and kiss me.

As the stage Rhett, Darius Danesh, "the one that lost Pop Idol", brings something of Clark Gable to every line. Far from minding about his impersonation, the audience seemed to lap up his exaggerated swagger. "It’s great fun, isn’t it?" said the jolly lady sitting behind me to her companion in the interval, after the dramatic burning of Atlanta scene.

There is the crux: this musical effort was surely made for devotees of that 1939 film. I’d guess that the average age of the theatre audience was nudging 80. They’d have watched Vivien Leigh ruffle her skirts and flirt her way across the screen first time round and were overjoyed to see their modern counterparts back before them — and bursting into song to boot.

While not a grey-haired octogenarian, I am a bit of a Gone With the Wind groupie, so I sat happily through the show. And even though you get the feeling that Nunn went through the script at random with a pencil earmarking short, sporadic spaces for songs, there are some terrifically powerful voices belting them out.

So fiddle-de-dee to triumphant theatre snobs; abridging Margaret Mitchell’s 1,000 pages into a musical was never going to please them.

But for fans of the original film and anyone with a romantic fibre lurking within, you could do worse than catch this fun, frothy show before it ends next week.

Until 14 June. Box office: 0844 412 4654.

Gone With The Wind
New London Theatre
Drury Lane (corner of Parker Street), WC2B 5PW