The last revival was on American television in March, with Glenn Close (too old and worldly for the role) as Nellie Forbush, the nurse assigned to the South Pacific during the war against the Japanese, who walks out on her enchanted evening with the French émigré planter Emile de Becque when she discovers he has two half-caste children by a defunct Polynesian mistress. But dramatically, the show can seem an embarrassing period piece, impeded by its chirpy postwar ebullience and its dated attitudes to sex and race. More than half a century after its premiere in 1949, the songs in South Pacific are classical enough, setting everyone's emotions to music: just try getting 'Some Enchanted Evening' or 'Younger than Springtime' out of your head. Next month the latest of these reappraisals opens in the Olivier: Nunn's production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's South Pacific officially inaugurates what the composer's estate grandly calls Rodgers Centennial Year.
The rule applies to Broadway musicals as much as to the plays of Shakespeare and Chekhov, which is why Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre has so nonchalantly alternated between Oklahoma! and The Merchant of Venice, My Fair Lady and The Cherry Orchard, shocking all four familiar texts into new life. A classic is always the same, yet it can only remain one if it is always evolving into something different.