Frankly, my dears, I did give a damn but not as big a damn as I had hoped. To put it another way: fiddlededee to some but not all the things that are occurring in a piece I wasn’t always sure should exist.

Margaret Martin’s book for her musical version of Gone with the Wind is almost too faithful to Margaret Mitchell’s novel and, at 190 minutes, certainly too long. Trevor Nunn’s cast sometimes left me hankering for Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, who breezed and dazzled their way through the film. Sadly, I often found myself wishing the musical just wasn’t a musical.

But that’s partly because Nunn has drawn on his experience with Nicholas Nickleby in 1980, giving us a production in which cast members inject pieces of narrative into the proceedings. This means that the story of Harlot Mascara — sorry, Scarlett O’Hara — doesn’t need songs in order to hold the attention. There are confusing bits (how does Rhett Butler escape that Yankee hangman?) and there are longueurs, especially in the second act. But the first half often has that brisk, energetic yet epic feel that one associates with Nunn’s work.

So Jill Paice’s Scarlett mournfully eyes Edward Baker-Duly’s Ashley Wilkes, the gentlemanly drip she adores, as he marries the virtuous Melanie Hamilton, while she is resisting that glamorous maverick, Darius Danesh’s Rhett. Meanwhile, war threatens those Southern belles and the Confederate flags that half-circle the audience. War duly arrives with the explosions, red light and mini-collapse of John Napier’s timbered set that signal the burning of Atlanta. Add plenty of hobbling soldiers and graphic description of Scarlett stepping over the dead, and the defeat of the South is adequately evoked. As for Danesh, he has the sauntering suavity that Gable brought to the role of Rhett, but not enough dash and danger. Those qualities are also lacking in Paice, who is warmer than Leigh in the film but still doesn’t have much fire burning within.

She gives us a bit of a feminist reading of Scarlett, which means you believe in her when she’s doughtily battling to save her beloved Tara, but you don’t fully do so when fury or passion are needed. And for a woman surely meant to embody the hard South that’s about to emerge as well as the genteel South that’s dying — well, she’s too nice.

Have Martin and Nunn tried to bring political correctness to Margaret Mitchell? Just a bit, notably when they’re treating black characters, and especially Jina Burrows’s Prissy, who is no ditsy airhead but a young woman who will use her freedom to become a teacher. Indeed, a gospel-style song in which the ex-slaves celebrate their liberty was received more warmly than any other, and a solo by Natasha Yvette Williams’s excellent Mammy almost equally so, even though neither was that relevant to the plot.

But then the rest of the music is rather so-so and the rhymed lyrics pretty flat. Did I really hear Scarlett’s dad boast in Irish ballad style that from Kerry to Connemara you won’t find land as fine as Tara? Or Scarlett sing that the life she used to know, the world she knew so well, “why did it have to turn into a living hell”? Compare that with the eloquent simplicity that marked every aspect of Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma!. It just doesn’t have the variety, the quirkiness or the moral power. And it doesn’t need the tunes.

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