Moonlight and Magnolias: Comedy captures the birth of a movie classic

Charles Spencer reviews Moonlight and Magnolias at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Ben Hecht was not only the co-author of that great stage comedy The Front Page, and so a hero to all of us who work in the inky trade, but also a prodigious Hollywood scriptwriter.

"You've got to get out here," a colleague wrote to him in the 1920s when Hecht was still a newspaperman. "Millions are to be grabbed and the only competition is idiots."

One of Hecht's biggest pay days came when the great producer David O Selznick called him in to write the screenplay of Gone With the Wind. The script had been written plenty of times before, of course, by many different hands. But Selznick wasn't satisfied.

Three weeks into shooting he fired the original director, George Cukor, and closed down the production. Director Victor Fleming was pulled off the final days' shooting of The Wizard of Oz to replace Cukor, and Hecht was hired as the rewrite man.

There was only one problem. Hecht hadn't read Margaret Mitchell's blockbuster, and he had only five free days to devote to the project.

This is the starting point to Ron Hutchinson's delightful screwball comedy that is also a valentine to the golden days of Hollywood. A prolific screenwriter himself, who knows what it is to be holed up in a hotel room at two in the morning with a script to doctor for the following day's shoot, Hutchinson has come up with a comedy of panache that's certainly worth giving a damn about.

Based on Hecht's own memoirs, the play shows the writer and director locked up with Selznick in his office with only bananas and peanuts to sustain them (Selznick believed they constituted "brain food"). And since there wasn't time for Hecht to read the book, the producer and the director hilariously act it out for him, scene by scene.

It's terrific stuff, with insults flying, tension building, and, in the second half, exhaustion setting in as the producer's office is reduced to a hideous mess of peanut shells, banana skins and screwed-up balls of rejected typescript.

Surprisingly, it isn't Hecht who emerges as the hero, but Selznick – pernickety, paranoid but never losing faith in his vision of making a truly great movie, whatever it costs in human endeavour. Andy Nyman gives a superb performance in the role, preposterous, ferociously demanding but also strangely loveable.

And in Sean Holmes's exhilarating, fast-talking production there is excellent work from Duncan Bell as the liberal-minded Hecht, who despises himself for working on a picture celebrating the slave-owning South, Steven Pacey as the witty, cynical director Fleming, and Josephine Butler as Selznick's increasingly dishevelled and desperate secretary.

In Hollywood parlance, this strikes me as a show with legs, and one deserving of a run beyond the Trike.