Critics unmoved by ‘Wind’

The London critics came, they saw, and frankly, my dear, most were unmoved by a new musical adaptation of “Gone With the Wind.”

Critics played on Rhett Butler’s famous exit line to Scarlett O’Hara:

“Frankly, it’s hard to give a damn about this Wind,” said the headline in Wednesday’s Daily Express about the show that opened Tuesday at the West End’s New London Theatre. The Times’ Benedict Nightingale was gentler. “I did give a damn,” he wrote. “But not as big a damn as I had hoped.”

Directed by Trevor Nunn, the show was written by Margaret Martin, who has never had a play produced professionally. Many critics felt her attempt to condense Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic left a play in which too much happened too quickly.

“How do you cram a 1,000-page novel into three-and-a-half hours of stage time?” asked Michael Billington in the Guardian. “With great difficulty.”