South Bank meets South Pacific

It was early 1949. South Pacific, the follow-up to Rodgers and Hammerstein's huge wartime hit Carousel, had entered the try-out phase before hitting New York. Late one night the production team were deep in one of those 11th-hour how-do-we-makeitbetter meetings that always precede the launch of a new musical. Eventually the composer, Richard Rodgers, cut to the chase. "Fellas," he said, "this show is perfect. Let's go to bed."

For all its perfection, for all the joyful familiarity of I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair and There is Nothin' Like a Dame, South Pacific has been kept hidden from Londoners. Aside from a touring version in the 1980s, starring Gemma Craven, there has been no big splashy stage production since before the Coronation.

That is about to change next week when Trevor Nunn brings the fabulously ebullient musical - with its chrome-yellow sky, stifling heat and smell of war - to the National.

Now that it's finally back, it has acquired a sudden topicality no one bargained for. "It's ironic to be doing South Pacific at a time when America is at war," says Nunn, of his last big Christmas bash before he hands over the National to Nicholas Hytner. "It's particularly ironic that just a few weeks ago people were saying, 'Not since Pearl Harbor.' Pearl Harbor is just a few short months before the events of this show."

Many of its songs are so famous they have floated free of their context. Some Enchanted Evening is a staple in hotel lifts. Nunn thinks "most people would be very surprised to discover it's about America at war, it's about colour prejudice in America and it's about two romances where people from completely different backgrounds discover that they are part of one world and the perceived barriers don't need to exist."

These difficult issues probably explain the scarcity of revivals. South Pacific is that rarity, a musical about contemporary events. The book was taken from the loosely knotted stories of James A Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (which, like the musical, won the Pulitzer Prize). What he evokes in his opening is "the waiting, the timeless, repetitive waiting" as thousands of American troops lingered in paradise anticipating probable death. Librettist Oscar Hammerstein latched onto parallel narratives in which Americans are asked to overcome their own prejudice. Nellie Forbush, an Arkansas nurse stationed in the Pacific at a critical point in the Second World War when America, in the words of an officer, is "taking a pasting on two continents", falls for Emile de Becque, a French plantation owner 20 years her senior, only to reject him when she discovers that he has sired a pair of cuties by a Polynesian woman. Meanwhile, freshfaced Lieutenant Joe Cable is smitten by a pretty young island girl while being serenaded by her souvenirselling mother Bloody Mary in the show's most evocative song, Bali Ha'i. Cable's Damascene valediction as he fatally heads for combat is the song Carefully Taught. It's said that this homily about racism - daring in 1949 - helped South Pacific beat Death of a Salesman to the Pulitzer; it certainly got the Deep South in a lather when it toured there.

After its Broadway run - it played for 1,925 performances there - the show transferred to the West End in 1951. The gamine Mary Martin reprised her role as Nellie. As people queued for tickets in heavy rain the night before the show opened, she serenaded them a cappella.

But South Pacific lives longer in the memory as a tacky, over-coloured and musically overdubbed movie from 1958 that sold the darker elements of the story short. There is also a studio recording with Kiri Te Kanawa as a less than hick-like Nellie and, as de Becque, Josè Carreras. Earlier this year an American TV channel presented a version starring Glenn Close as a long-in-the-tooth Nellie and the great Serbian actor Rade Serbedzija. Matthew Bourne, South Pacific's choreographer, says it was "embarrassing". Nunn has made a point of not watching it, perhaps to avoid an awkward conversation with Close when he directs her next year in A Streetcar Named Desire.

With Nunn and Bourne back in harness after the triumph of My Fair Lady, the production has the credentials to be a hit. There was no credited choreographer in the original show, as director Joshua Logan wanted the sailors putting on a Thanksgiving show at the end of act one to look natural and amateurish. Bourne's task is to make that amateurishness seem professional. "It shouldn't look like they can all dance," he says. "They'd look like a bunch of chorus boys."

This time there is no star casting. Nunn has once more plumped for authenticity, much as he did with Martine McCutcheon in My Fair Lady. Lauren Kennedy is a squeaky-clean southern blonde from Carolina and couldn't embody the innocence of Nellie's Cock-Eyed Optimist more thoroughly if she tried. And perhaps even ignorance: before landing the role, she says, "I had no idea what the Pacific war was about." Before Kennedy got the part, as little was known about her over here. She was in two of Nunn's US productions of Sunset Boulevard, but South Pacific may do for her what playing Curly did for X-Men star Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!, Nunn's previous date with Rodgers and Hammerstein. "I thought of her immediately, says Nunn. "I just feel she was born to do this."