Ron Hutchinson’s play is a seriously hilarious comedy farce, a realistic fantasy about a real event, and the theatre’s brilliantly backhanded homage to movies. The setting (1939) is the office of the Hollywood producer David O Selznick (Andy Nyman), who, with the writer Ben Hecht (Duncan Bell) and the director Victor Fleming (Steven Pacey), is going through the agonies of rewriting the script for Gone with the Wind. The whiplash dialogue has the brutal beat of David Mamet, combined with the mad-intelligent humour of the best American comedies. Hollywood is the lunatic asylum for the sane and the driven, and Nyman gives Selznick the kind of deranged charisma, both greedy and lyrical, that is the fuel of success. Under all this runs a dark stream of insecurity: the manic need to win, the role of Jews in Hollywood, the defiant fear of failure. Sean Holmes’s production moves with masterful confidence between the depressive and the intoxicated moods of fury, excitement, despair and demented confidence. If this play doesn’t make it to the West End, we might as well pack it in.

Tricycle

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